Re: [patch] remove hugetlb syscalls

Linus Torvalds
2002-11-16T18:08:19Z

On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> This always happens when the discussions occurred in private and
> 99% of the community didn't see them. No need to be surprised
> that people are asking the questions others have answered before
> in a place nobody could see ;)

Part of the problem is that the companies involved (mainly Intel and
Oracle) both have a hard time just talking about their stuff in public on
linux-kernel. It looks like Intel is getting a lot better at it, it's
been my one major message to the people there I know. Oracle engineers
still don't seem to talk much publicly about their issues and trials,
though.

(Part of that may actually be due to stupid benchmark rules. They aren't
even allowed to publicize their basic benchmark numbers while doing
development, even though those numbers are the primary thing they care
about. Frigging stupid rules, entirely designed for closed development.)

So not only did you have a feature that is mostly useful only to a
smallish group of people - you had that group of people not used to open
communication in the first place, AND you had rules that made some of the
important part of the communication illegal in the first place.

Still wonder why it wasn't widely discussed during development? Intel
engineers would bvasically take people asdie in private at conferences
talking about what kinds of improvments Oracle was seeing..

Oh, well.

Linus