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posted by mrpg on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the RAM-is-memory dept.

Take a walk down memory lane...

This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer read it to you at high speed is an even better option.

Linux is 20 years old this year. That's a long time. Since I was there from the beginning I thought I'd share some memories of what's happened.

In 1988 I graduated from high school, and got accepted into the University of Helsinki to study computer science. The studies started in September, and also in September I got invited to join Spektrum, the Swedish speaking club for those studying math, physics, chemistry, geography, or computer science.

Spektrum is a social club, which was good, since I was, and remain, shy and socially awkward, and the club provided me with a way to easily meet people when I'd moved into a new city. That's also where I met the only other Swedish speaking new CS student of that year, a guy named Linus Torvalds.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @06:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @06:46AM (#444968)

    The kernel bloat is mostly undocumented. A lot of the new features added over the years are implicit rather than explicit with configuration options.

    One notable complaint for me is: They are taking hardware Kconfig patches without vetting their system/bus ifdefs.

    As an example: many ARM SoC GPUs show up in the graphics config options on x86 and other non-ARM ARCHes. On some of the other platforms bus options show up which were never offered on that platform, or are explicitly x86 hardware that wasn't properly scripted in Kconfig to be omitted on non-x86 platforms.

    The rest of the examples would be in network protocols like ipv6 and ipv4 where new (but unnecessary) features are being added into the core rather than as options, leading to an inability to update kernels on older especially embedded hardware using the same exact build options you did in the past.

    Another big problem is many new pieces of hardware are being configured to default to Y (not even *M*!) in the Kconfig files, which it is niche items that the rest of its particular configuration tree defaults to N and as a result pulls in parent dependencies you may have previously configured out, but gets pulled in by default when using your old config on a new kernel version (and doesn't prompt on all new options as it should!)

    Having said that, thanks to musl, libcs are actually smaller today than they were back in the 90s when gnu libc 6 took over. And musl is generally much more compatible with legacy applications/compilers than newer versions of glibc without an encyclopedic knowledge of glibc changelogs, special gnu-specific compiler features and added hardcoded function symbol version identifiers to get it to use a particular old flavor you need the quirks of.

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