Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on: When a Fix May or May Not Be a Fix; and Linux Longevity.
When a Fix May or May Not Be a Fix
Sometimes what looks like an improvement turns out to be not only more trouble than it's worth, but also something that has an easier workaround. And sometimes it turns out that the workaround misses a key detail, and the original improvement may be less trouble than anything else.
In Linux kernel development, this situation is not as uncommon as it might seem. The struggle to support all hardware in use in the world, while keeping a clean and maintainable codebase, poses many puzzles with unexpected solutions.
Recently, Josh Poimboeuf submitted a patch to the deep, assembly language code that is sometimes used in the Linux kernel when the compilers are unable to convert C language code into something small enough or efficient enough to do what the kernel needs. It happens. The kernel is mostly written in C, but there's plenty of hard-coded assembly code in there, too.
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