On Mar 29, 2007, at 20:09:11, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
On Mar 29 2007 18:54, Kyle Moffett wrote:
One thing that I think is fairly non-obvious to newcomers is that
Linux kernel development is not done at all the way they teach you
in your Large Scale Software Engineering classes. Many of those
classes talk much about careful design (whether top-down, bottom-
up, outside-in, waterfall, spiral, $BUZZWORD_OF_THE_DAY) and
detailed unit-testing, whereas Linux kernel development isn't
really "designed" at all.
Well, linux kernel is "extreme programming" - hack away until it
works, care about a design shape and stable API later.
I somewhat disagree. Look at the amount of _design_ which is going
into the linux-virtualization stuff, the replacement SLAB subsystems
(SLOB/SLUB), or the current queued-spinlock thread. Admittedly with
Linux 90% of the design process is rewriting the code a thousand
times based on comments before it goes into mainline, but that's
design nonetheless. It's just evolved-design-by-committee, a very
knowledgeable committee made of the people who are interested in and
understand what's going on well enough to give useful input and with
enough sense of technical value to veto anything with significant
architectural problems.
Cheers,
Kyle Moffett
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
