Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 8 Nov 2011 14:29:35 +0100 | From | Karel Zak <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] KVM: Add wrapper script around QEMU to test kernels |
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On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 03:12:28PM +0200, Pekka Enberg wrote: > On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:47 PM, Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote: > > I don't think perf should be used as a precendent that now argues that > > any new kernel utility should be moved into the kernel sources. Does > > it make sense to move all of mount, fsck, login, etc., into the kernel > > sources? There are far more kernel tools outside of the kernel > > sources than inside the kernel sources.
[...]
> I don't know if it makes sense to merge the tools you've mentioned above. > My gut feeling is that it's probably not reasonable - there's already a > community working on it with their own development process and coding > style. I don't think there's a simple answer to this but I don't agree with > your rather extreme position that all userspace tools should be kept out > of the kernel tree.
Ted's position is not extreme. He follows the simple and exactly defined border between userspace and kernel. The native userspace feature is variability and substitutability.
The util-linux package is really nice example:
- you don't have to use it, you can use busybox
- we have currently three implementation of login(1), many getty implementations, etc.
- it's normal that people use the latest util-linux releases with very old kernels (in year 2008 I had report from person with kernel 2.4:-)
- userspace is very often about portability -- it's crazy, but some people use some utils from util-linux on Hurd, Solaris and BSD (including very Linux specific things like mkswap and hwclock)
Anyway, I agree that small one-man projects are ineffective for important system tools -- it's usually better to merge things into large projects with reliable infrastructure and alive community (here I agree with Lennart's idea to have 3-5 projects for whole low-level userspace).
Karel
-- Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com> http://karelzak.blogspot.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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