--- Peter Popov <ppopov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > There is no such thing as a 10 sec patch review. > Especially when it > comes to patches that touch generic portions of the > kernel. That is extremely true. One has to only look at the number of "Brown Paper Bag" releases, over the history of Linux, to realize that even the intense reviews that take place are sometimes not enough. > MIPS Tech and linux-mips are separate entities. > Personally I think MIPS > Tech has done a great service to themselves, their > customers, and the > entire Linux MIPS community, by hiring Ralf to do > new MIPS development > and properly support new chips coming out. Whilst I agree entirely, I think we need to put a little more perspective on this. The Linux kernel is big. Very, very big. By my estimate, it would take an army of 10,000+ full-time software engineers skilled in "Extreme Programming" and formal methods to be able to verify something of the complexity and intricacy of the Linux kernel within a single year, excluding any changes made during that time, which will likely replace so much of the code that the verification won't tell you much anyway. If every company and every University involved in Linux - not just every consortium - were to contribute, you might be able to amass that kind of manpower. One full-time coder for the entire of the MIPS side of the tree is valuable and it's doubtful any branch could now survive long without at least that, one person is simply not capable of replacing ten thousand, no matter how brilliant they are. This isn't to say MIPS Tech should necessarily throw in more manpower, although I certainly wouldn't argue with that. It's that there's simply no realistic way to get enough manpower together to do code reviews in the kind of timeframes that people are asking for. Rather than curse out the absence of something that is beyond any realistic reach, it might be good for people to reflect on the sheer magnitude of what we do have. I'd also like to throw in one other thought - people have patches and patch-sets on web pages that are popular but don't get merged in for ages, or sometimes at all. I know this as well as anyone can - I ran a project for a while that did nothing but collect the really significant patches and patchsets out there and merge them into one gigantic megapatch. It was about two-thirds the size of the kernel itself. Even at that kind of size, there was probably as much out there that I knew about but omitted as I included, and very likely ten times as much as all that combined that I never knew about at all. Today, with far more developers, far more hardware, far more gadgets and gizmos, vastly more R&D, and infinitely more interest in Linux, the ratio of included code to code "missing, presumed blogged" can only be worse. The various development teams don't scale nearly as well or as fast as the Internet. On that basis, my guess is that there is probably between 15-20 times as much interesting code out there that has not been reviewed and included as there is code in the whole of the Linux kernel as it currently stands. If, as may well happen, interest goes through another explosion before 2.8 gets out, then this could easily double over the next three or four years. Yes, I wish things moved faster. Yes, I wish there were fewer problems with some of the boards I use. I also wish I knew next week's lottery numbers. The odds of me finding a valid solution to the third seems infinitely more likely than anyone developing a perfect, lightning-speed solution to the first two. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
