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Comment by icare_1er | Hacker News Reader

I am no kernel-ninja and my experience is limited to a few kprints just to not be a complete noob. My question to the knowledgeable people would be: has the linux kernel become too big and too complex to maintain ? By that i mean, like for an organization, when most of the cost/efforts, are spent on just maintaining/understanding stuff.

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The core of the kernel is actually pretty small and very well understood and maintained.

If your company needs to write drivers for some hardware you produce, there are often specific subsystems to target with have their own maintainers and documentation.

Where things get really ugly is when a company decides to cook their own linux platform and they change tons of stuff without always understanding what they are doing.

I guess early android would be a good example of that...

> The core of the kernel is actually pretty small and very well understood and maintained.

I still find that even Linux based OSes like Ubuntu crash at least once a month or so. I've had to boot into initrd and manually do fsck on my laptop once this year. I'm not a software guy but I assume the reason for all this crappiness (windows as well) is because of all the patents on operating system stuff by Microsoft and Google. I'm saying this slightly tongue in cheek beacuse as a display guy I frequently see software people say display technologies suck because of all the patents so I assume that's what they experience in their own industry?

Maybe you are conflating the gui crashing with the kernel, or maybe it's just shitty hardware you have.

I'd be up to my neck with more work if it was generally true.

I've had kernel panic in nouveau GPU driver after typing reset into tty2. Crashes happen, and the more you deviate from the herd, the more crashes you will encounter.

Nouveau and the proprietary NVidia driver are both horrible sources of crashes. Don't confuse an individual driver with most of Linux. Where uptime matters, don't use hardware with crap drivers.

When's the last time you saw a server crash because of a bug in VFS, memory management, or such?

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