Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on avoiding bloat in the Kernel that does everything, and particularly odd occurrences of Stardust.
Avoiding Bloat in the Kernel That Does Everything
Sometimes prospective features are useful, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're useful, but only to a very specific set of users that somehow straddle the divide between first- and second-class citizens. These special users are the kernel developers themselves.
Steven Rostedt recently posted a patch that would generate a permanent file in the TraceFS filesystem. The file would identify the directory entries (dentries) and their reference counts, for dynamic file creation in the EventFS filesystem. Steven pointed to a recent debugging session where part of the debugging process involved creating such a file. He felt it would be useful for future debugging to have such a file available by default.
There followed a fascinating exchange between Linus Torvalds and Steven. Linus's take on the situation was that "this is neither a bug-fix, nor does it seem to make any sense at all in the main tree. This really feels like a 'temporary debug patch for tracing developers'."
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