Werner Almesberger wrote: > Sean McNeil wrote: >> Like a watchdog process? > > Exactly :-) It could monitor all other sorts of things as well, if > necessary (trading reliability through simplicity for functionality), > and it could also be gated. > > And the best things is of course that, whatever fancy policy user > space needs to implement, not a single line in the kernel has to > change and we avoid all the deployment issues with making kernel > changes :-) > > - Werner
Sigh. I understand what you are arguing, and at some point in the future, I would even agree. But not yet. None of the distros, and certainly not the kernel, are stable enough to ensure that any such code would actually remain running -- for every "solution" you come up with to insulate such a daemon from a failure, somebody somewhere will come up with another way to make it fail. So, we can can move to another round in the constant battle I have with you and Andy over the premature removal of debug code from the kernel, and we can argue this for the next few days. But that is just a waste of everyone's time. Of course Openmoko can just unilaterally do what you state, and force developers for every distro to invest huge amounts of effort in developing fail-safe watchdog daemons for their distros. But that would be effort that the community would rather see invested in making the device behave like a proper phone. Am I the only one who thinks it's rather amazing that after two years, we still don't have reliable basic phone functionality?! And you present a proposal to make those developers take time away in order to write daemons to replace a small chunk of existing and functional kernel code? This makes no sense at all to me. I suggest that we all take a "reality pill" and accept that the kernel is still only as stable as a bowl of jello, that the folks doing user-space don't have time to write new daemons, and that our goal continues to be to make these devices work at some small level of what they should. Obviously, the best thing is to keep that little bit of kernel code in place. (And to waste no further time on discussing it!) General comment to Openmoko: Come on! Have you all lost sight of the fact that the goal is to make a phone, and that nothing shipped to date has yet made the device work any better than a $25 pre-paid phone I can buy from a stand at the local shopping center? Yes, I'm frustrated. And I know that many others in the community are too. Listen up, Openmoko! We need some progress: suspend/resume with that ***** glamo (WSOD); the GSM is still broken (check out #1024 and others); batteries still go flat because nobody has coded the batt-low stuff; the wifi cannot be powered off; and many other kernel issues that should be worked instead! Regards, Mike
