Re: Linux/Pro [was Re: Coding style - a non-issue]

Rik van Riel
2001-12-01T11:42:38Z

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 06:17:43PM -0800, Davide Libenzi wrote:

> > So, if these guys are smart, work hard and are professionals, why did they
> > take bad design decisions ?
> > Why didn't they implemented different solutions like, let's say "multiple
> > independent OSs running on clusters of 4 CPUs" ?
>
> Because, just like the prevailing wisdom in the Linux hackers, they
> thought it would be relatively straightforward to get SMP to work.
> They started at 2, went to 4, etc., etc. Noone ever asked them to go
> from 1 to 100 in one shot. It was always incremental.

Incremental stuff always breaks and misses out on the corner
cases. The same seems to be true for stuff coming out of
random mutation and biological selection ... natural selection
really doesn't care about corner cases.

This, for example, has always resulted in a VM subsystem which
works nicely under low load but falls apart under high load.
Any efforts to fix that corner case have been met with nothing
but resistance.

Lets face it, if you want to deal with corner cases you don't
want to deal with Linus.

regards,

Rik
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