5 ms·

Roughly 11.5 million lines of code for the kernel.. That's way more than I would have imagined.. 5k lines a day are added and 2k are modified. (http://www.itwor

by Gibbon 17y ago

Roughly 11.5 million lines of code for the kernel.. That's way more than I would have imagined.. 5k lines a day are added and 2k are modified. (http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/IT-Workplace/68f20d4f-8ab9-402c-be30-df47e9812836.html http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/IT-Workplace/68f20d4f-8ab9-40...) IMHO it doesn't really jive with UNIX principles to have such a monolithic kernel.

mahmud 17y ago
It's monolithic but modular 11.5M LOC for every platform it runs on, not to mention drivers for the devices it supports, and all the modules for other functionality, pluggable file-systems and networking stacks. Now throw in code for backward compatibility going further back at least to 2.4 and you have 11.5M lines. In reality, the core Linux kernel is just the stuff that compiles to vmlinux. You could read it all in a few weeks and understand it.
- skwiddor 17y ago
  thats right, bloat filesystems dont belong in the kernel.
  - agazso 17y ago
    Yeah, there is the FUSE project: filesystem in a userspace. There are lots of interesting filesystems using this e.g. NTFS-3G, sshfs or ferrisfuse. These projects are valuable and most of them doesn't belong to the kernel as they use userspace libraries for network protocols and xml parsing. Unfortunately native disk file systems like NTFS-3G is lot more slower than their native counterparts.
    - scythe 17y ago
      &totse users ran tests of zfs-fuse back in the day and found that it was actually noticeably slower than native ext3. From that, I'm inclined to argue the opposite: filesystems should almost definitely be in-kernel. Granted, their tests were on Linux, not on a modern microkernel.
      - skwiddor 17y ago
        Linux, fuse there's your problem. it's not designed for it
    - skwiddor 17y ago
      I wouldn't use Fuse as your benchmark. All of plan9's filesystems are userspace (except the one that uses a dedicated machine). They can saturate 10gbe so your objections really concern Fuse and it's hosts.
    - agazso 17y ago
      Well, with the last sentence I tried to write: Unfortunately userspace file systems like NTFS-3G are lot slower than their native counterparts. Which is understandable, regarding kernel calls are still quite expensive.

by Gibbon 17y ago

mahmud 17y ago

It's monolithic but modular 11.5M LOC for every platform it runs on, not to mention drivers for the devices it supports, and all the modules for other functionality, pluggable file-systems and networking stacks. Now throw in code for backward compatibility going further back at least to 2.4 and you have 11.5M lines. In reality, the core Linux kernel is just the stuff that compiles to vmlinux. You could read it all in a few weeks and understand it.

skwiddor 17y ago
thats right, bloat filesystems dont belong in the kernel.
- agazso 17y ago
  Yeah, there is the FUSE project: filesystem in a userspace. There are lots of interesting filesystems using this e.g. NTFS-3G, sshfs or ferrisfuse. These projects are valuable and most of them doesn't belong to the kernel as they use userspace libraries for network protocols and xml parsing. Unfortunately native disk file systems like NTFS-3G is lot more slower than their native counterparts.
  - scythe 17y ago
    &totse users ran tests of zfs-fuse back in the day and found that it was actually noticeably slower than native ext3. From that, I'm inclined to argue the opposite: filesystems should almost definitely be in-kernel. Granted, their tests were on Linux, not on a modern microkernel.
    - skwiddor 17y ago
      Linux, fuse there's your problem. it's not designed for it
  - skwiddor 17y ago
    I wouldn't use Fuse as your benchmark. All of plan9's filesystems are userspace (except the one that uses a dedicated machine). They can saturate 10gbe so your objections really concern Fuse and it's hosts.
  - agazso 17y ago
    Well, with the last sentence I tried to write: Unfortunately userspace file systems like NTFS-3G are lot slower than their native counterparts. Which is understandable, regarding kernel calls are still quite expensive.