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1) Worst reputation for verbal abuse of any open source project around 2) Actively cultivated reputation for being esoteric and difficult to get started in 3)

1) Worst reputation for verbal abuse of any open source project around 2) Actively cultivated reputation for being esoteric and difficult to get started in 3) Few "big wins" left. Young devs want to work where there is plenty of land to conquer. This often leads to a jump towards new platforms with plenty of low hanging fruit (node.js is a great example of this in action at the moment, and I say this as a node.js guy in his twenties).

bifrost 13y ago
> 2) Actively cultivated reputation for being esoteric and difficult to get started in You're kidding, right? Kernel programming is not like sitting down and bro-ing out some code to make a webapp, its actually fairly difficult to get right. It should be hard to get code into the kernel, because you know, its a vitally important part of how your computer runs. This is actually a big part of the problem with Linux in the first place, for quite some time it was much too easy to get bad code into the kernel and stability and security suffered. Now that its finally becoming important to people, you don't get /dev/beer added in a week...
- NegativeK 13y ago
  While I completely agree with your underlying point, your tone is a bit silly in a not good way.
  - bifrost 13y ago
    My tone is fine. While I appreciate enthusiasm for projects, enthusiasm without skill is a net loss for everyone working on the project, and thats what the author was proposing. Its a horrible idea and it hurts the entire community to suggest that inclusiveness increases productivity because it does not.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Well then why does the foundation attempt to extend to hobbyist programmers? You can't have it both ways - having hobbyist/web programmers and highly educated in the ways hardware works.
cgag 13y ago
3 Rings true to me. I've been running just linux for years, and I have no idea what's improved in the last few versions of the kernel. There are lots of other things I'm interested in that clearly need improvement and are much more satisfying to work on. I mean also to be honest, I also just don't want to work in C.
- lambda 13y ago
  Read LWN, or check Kernel Newbies, and you'll get a pretty good sense of what's going on. Some of it is some fairly esoteric stuff that's not all that interesting unless it happens to be the kind of thing you're interested in. A lot of it is just more hardware support and drivers, which is of course only interesting if you have that particular hardware. But some of it is really great new stuff; cgroups for dividing processes up into groups and being able to control them together, monitoring and limiting resources on a whole group basis. Namespaces (user, PID, network, etc), which together with some userspace tools give you containers for lightweight virtualization (this is what trendy things like Docker use to provide you with instant and easy containers for deploying apps). There are a couple of distributed filesystems (Ceph and Lustre) which have landed in the kernel recently, and there's btrfs which is developing rapidly as Linux's next-gen filesystem, supporting snapshots, checksums, integrated volume management and RAID, and so on. There's reshaping support in the software RAID system, allowing you to change RAID layouts on the fly (going from a 2-disk RAID 1 to a 3 disk RAID-5 to a 6 disk RAID-6, say). There are new SSD caching options, allowing you to use both an SSD and large but slow spinning disk, caching random reads and writes on the SSD, getting the best of both worlds. There are new sandboxing tools that give you the ability to run BPF filters on attempted system calls, giving you fine-grained sandboxing support (used by Chrome to better sandbox the renderer). There's lots going on in the kernel space if you pay attention. You do have to be interested in infrastructure; if you're just interested in applications, you mostly wait until whoever provides your platform (Amazon or Heroku, or Google in the case of Android, or Canonical, or Red Hat) packages these up into a nice, easy to use platform, and you may not ever realize what kernel changes went on underneath to allow these new services. But there sure is a lot going on, and I at least think it's pretty interesting.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

bifrost 13y ago

> 2) Actively cultivated reputation for being esoteric and difficult to get started in You're kidding, right? Kernel programming is not like sitting down and bro-ing out some code to make a webapp, its actually fairly difficult to get right. It should be hard to get code into the kernel, because you know, its a vitally important part of how your computer runs. This is actually a big part of the problem with Linux in the first place, for quite some time it was much too easy to get bad code into the kernel and stability and security suffered. Now that its finally becoming important to people, you don't get /dev/beer added in a week...

NegativeK 13y ago
While I completely agree with your underlying point, your tone is a bit silly in a not good way.
- bifrost 13y ago
  My tone is fine. While I appreciate enthusiasm for projects, enthusiasm without skill is a net loss for everyone working on the project, and thats what the author was proposing. Its a horrible idea and it hurts the entire community to suggest that inclusiveness increases productivity because it does not.
Ygg2 13y ago
Well then why does the foundation attempt to extend to hobbyist programmers? You can't have it both ways - having hobbyist/web programmers and highly educated in the ways hardware works.

cgag 13y ago

3 Rings true to me. I've been running just linux for years, and I have no idea what's improved in the last few versions of the kernel. There are lots of other things I'm interested in that clearly need improvement and are much more satisfying to work on. I mean also to be honest, I also just don't want to work in C.

lambda 13y ago
Read LWN, or check Kernel Newbies, and you'll get a pretty good sense of what's going on. Some of it is some fairly esoteric stuff that's not all that interesting unless it happens to be the kind of thing you're interested in. A lot of it is just more hardware support and drivers, which is of course only interesting if you have that particular hardware. But some of it is really great new stuff; cgroups for dividing processes up into groups and being able to control them together, monitoring and limiting resources on a whole group basis. Namespaces (user, PID, network, etc), which together with some userspace tools give you containers for lightweight virtualization (this is what trendy things like Docker use to provide you with instant and easy containers for deploying apps). There are a couple of distributed filesystems (Ceph and Lustre) which have landed in the kernel recently, and there's btrfs which is developing rapidly as Linux's next-gen filesystem, supporting snapshots, checksums, integrated volume management and RAID, and so on. There's reshaping support in the software RAID system, allowing you to change RAID layouts on the fly (going from a 2-disk RAID 1 to a 3 disk RAID-5 to a 6 disk RAID-6, say). There are new SSD caching options, allowing you to use both an SSD and large but slow spinning disk, caching random reads and writes on the SSD, getting the best of both worlds. There are new sandboxing tools that give you the ability to run BPF filters on attempted system calls, giving you fine-grained sandboxing support (used by Chrome to better sandbox the renderer). There's lots going on in the kernel space if you pay attention. You do have to be interested in infrastructure; if you're just interested in applications, you mostly wait until whoever provides your platform (Amazon or Heroku, or Google in the case of Android, or Canonical, or Red Hat) packages these up into a nice, easy to use platform, and you may not ever realize what kernel changes went on underneath to allow these new services. But there sure is a lot going on, and I at least think it's pretty interesting.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]