On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> everyone has to start from nothing. But if the learning/development
> curve is too steep, or the process is too frustrating, you are going
> to lose a proportion of the potential gurus. You can't push people in
> a direction they don't want to go. [...]
nobody wants to force anything on anyone - you are free to apply KDB and
the other debugging patches. But we can certainly help the usage of the
right kind of debugging methodology.
> [...] From what I've seen, most of the
> active developers are chronically overworked. Many projects compete
> for your attention. Why hit your head against a purposely erected
> brick wall?
active developers certainly have the skills to apply debugging facilities
they need. The reference kernel should be IMO 'untainted' though. Believe
me, during the 2.3.2x pagecache rewrite my kernel was hacked with ad-hoc
debugging code beyond recognition - eg. automatic checksumming of every
physical page in the system to detect stray DMA related memory corruption.
No rocket science, but ugly enough to 'taint' the kernel proper. Would any
of the debugging facilities advocated in this thread have helped in the
bugs we were chasing at that time? Nope. Do i want such debugging code to
ever show up in the mainsteam kernel? Hell no.
you dont want to carry a whole car-construction factory along with you
when you are rally-racing. You probably want to carry a spare tire and a
mobile phone - anything else would be a slowdown.
Ingo
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 07 2000 - 21:00:23 EST