Why complexity is bad and open source is good
Attack of the Killer ftrace
When a test kernel starts wrecking network cards, the community gets busy.
Complexity is an amazing and terrible thing. One of the first Intel CPUs was called the 4004 (released in 1971) and contained 2,300 transistors. The Pentium 4 (released in 2000) had 48 million transistors, and a modern Quad core CPU has around 2 billion transistors. In 2008 the Linux 2.6.27 kernel surpassed 10 million lines of code. Personally, my experience has been that more transistors mean a better computer. On the opposite side, despite faster hardware, Linux still seems to take the same amount of time to boot up and present a working desktop.
Network Card Killings
In late August 2008, a number of reports regarding e1000e network cards became public [1]. Not just the typical "I upgraded my driver and my network stopped working," but actual "my network card has stopped working and is not being enumerated at boot time and it's completely dead now" reports.
The good news is that hardware is cheap. The bad news is that hardware is cheap.
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