Messages in this thread |  | | From | devnull@spaans ... | Date | Mon, 11 Sep 2000 11:00:35 -0400 | Subject | Re: Availability of kdb |
| |
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 17:06:17 -0600 From: "Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@timpanogas.com>
One of the principal architects at Compaq called me Friday after reading Linus' email about not caring about commercial or support issues for commercialization of Linux on this topic-- his right -- it had the anticipated impact I would expect, and it's rippling through the industry. This topic on kernel debuggers and Linux kernel development philosophy has been an unknown to a lot of folks in the commercial software world for a long time and now Linus has made some things very clear.
Since Linus has rejected kdb there's every indication he will reject any other kernel debugger submissions -- also his right. I think my time would be better spent completing the merge of the Linux code base onto MANOS since moving the debugger over to Linux seems to not be something Linus would adopt and it's contrary to his development philosophy, so it's probably a complete waste of my time.
Remember, there's a big difference between what's in the "official" tree as distributed by Linus, and what people actually use in distributions. For example, just about every distribution I know uses NFS patches that never made it into the 2.2 tree because of Alan's concerns about backwards compatibility. (A commendable concern, but when just about everyone is using the patch, the discrepancy between what most users who are using a precompiled kernel see and what they get if they try to compile a kernel on their own --- since they're likely not to know about the required NFS patches if they what to be comptible with other Unix systems --- is something I'd concerned more important. But then again, I'm not in charge of the 2.2 kernel; that's Alan's call.)
So it wouldn't surprise me that if someone kept a well-matained kernel debugger and crash dumping patch (such as the one by SGI) if most commercial distributions included them as a matter of course.
It's important not to get *too* badly fixated over what's in the "official blessed Linux kernel distribution which has the holy penguin pee on it."
If I get time to create a patch for Linux, I'll put it up. kdb seems to be already there, so folks can use it on Linux for now, and I'll stick to printk() and code reviews for my debugging on Linux.
If you come up with robust, easy to patch source-code-level debugger for Linux, some people will use it, and some people won't. If it's better than kdb, eventually it'll displace kdb as the external kernel debugger of choice. As with all things, the cardinal rule in this community still applies: "show me the code".
- Ted - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |