Re: Zen kernel, what are advantages if any?

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Greg Woods wrote:

> I am not a kernel developer, but I know a little about this indirectly.
> Whether a project gets accepted into mainline depends on a lot of
> things, but one of the big ones is how intrusive it is. If it requires
> changes to many drivers and many places in the kernel, it is much more
> difficult to get it merged into mainline. This is why, for instance, the
> Xen hypervisor is still not part of the mainline even though it has been
> used in production in many places for years (and is officially supported
> in Red Hat Enterprise). Conversely, the KVM hypervisor is part of
> mainline already, even though (in my experience) it is not nearly as
> robust as Xen. But KVM is a much less intrusive set of patches so it was
> much easier to get it merged.

What you say is generally true, but in some cases there is a legitimate
suspicion that being "in the right circles" plays a role too.

You are right on Xen/KVM, but for example:

- a scheduler from Con Kolivas is developed for years and widely used,
merging it is always denied until someone else creates a "similar"
scheduler and it is accepted immediately

[the scheduler is a core part of the kernel, so why a freshly written
one is preferred to a mature one?]

- the reiser4 filesystem has been released in 2004 (!) and has never
been accepted; ext4, instead, has been basically developed inside
the mainline kernel and a similar thing happens for btrfs

[a filesystem is something totally isolated, only people using it
can have problems; the rejection was justified by saying that Hans
Reiser is a difficult guy to cope with (which is probably true)]

Tuxonice is just another of the big "but why not?" denied projects.

In this way, real features are missed. I do not have a particular
interest in "desktop oriented" scheduling, but I really care about
efficiently storing 1 million 50-byte long files in a single dir
(is any filesystem better than reiser3 for this?), and I
really care about a reliable hibernation which saves everything
(including the cache! cache *is* system speed, nowadays) to disk in
compressed/encrypted form while pushing the maximum speed the HD is
capable of.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it
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