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Comment by trillic | Hacker News Reader

So what? This code (and most drivers, modules, additional fucntionality, etc) will only be compiled in if necessary and will only actually be run if you use the feature.

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My concern is not about what my flavor of kernel includes. It's about the size of the codebase, and whether the limited number of maintainers can keep up with the countless features being introduced.

I mean I think in terms of maintainer resources Linux is one of the projects with the least to worry about, there are always companies who are willing to have a team work on stuff.

Those megacorps also accumulate endless complexity internally, as does the industry as a whole. It's a problem larger than the discipline of reviewers of C code could ever hope to fix.

Even the larger world outside the field is somewhat aware of the the looming complexity problem: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...

Basically on our current trajectory we will end up with something like the biosphere that can do stuff but too complex to fully understand --- but also probably well more fragile than that?

That’s what testing is for. We can’t really reason globally about much smaller codebases either Software is complex.

The kernel is regularly shedding off unmaintained code.

So the codebase is actually not growing as much as it could.

The code they're shedding off is drivers. They won't ever get rid of old syscalls because Linus refuses to break userspace, ever.

Frequently the old syscall just ends up as a stub that calls into the new implementation though.

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