Linus Torvalds: 'Linux is bloated'

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Jon VanAlten <vanaltj-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Darryl Moore <darryl-90a536wCiRb3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>
>> :-)
>>
>> Sorry Jon I didn't RTFA.
>
> No need to be, and you're better off keeping it that way!  ;-)
>
>>
>> Does the blog refer to Linux in terms of a
>> distribution or in terms of a kernel?
>
> Well from what I can tell Linus was talking in a round table about the
> kernel, but the blog (whose author makes me want to tear my hair out
> frequently, and which I am sure was purely based on the short article I
> linked) made it out to be referring to distributions, or at the least was
> not clear about it and then used it to segue into his own commentary about
> bloat in distros.  For folks not truly familiar with Linux or the internals
> of operating systems in general, which surely there are some such folks in
> the set of CNET readers, my thought is that people would think it was the
> whole system becoming bloated.  Which is the root of my problems with the
> post.  (note my problem is with Asay and not the Michael who posted it to
> this list!!)

While it may not be legitimate to draw such conclusions based on the
discussion involving Linus, it seems to me that there *ARE* strong
arguments to be made to the effect that the entire systems are
becoming bloated.

- I've got 79MB of "stuff" in /lib (on host "wolfe"), of which 65MB
are kernel modules.  That's quite a bit of stuff, and the kernel isn't
innocent!

- /usr/lib has 1.3GB of stuff.  That's by no means "small."

There's a LOT of stuff there.  More stuff than I have memory, and if
those are supposed to be shared libraries for apps I'm running,
there's *something* conceptually busted there...

Several of us were chatting about this the other week at "no beer
we're outside."

Something has in effect gone wrong that we have libraries that are
some combination of insufficiently stable with perhaps other things
such that there are just gratuitous layerings of extra library upon
extra library cluttering up our systems.

We have historically been somewhat better-off than Windows folks where
they have had the habit of getting side-swiped by library changes.
"Oh, you want to run that new app?  Well, we'll be overwriting some
libraries for you, thereby breaking the old apps!"  We tend to have
more or less legitimate version numbers that allow us to have
co-existing versions of libraries.

Historically, a "fun" Linux distribution has been orc's Mastodon:
http://mastodon.biz/

"My Linux distribution, which features a primarily BSD Unix userland,
a completely a.out set of systems programs (to avoid the wonderland of
gl*bc backwards incompatability), and a lot of experimental things I'm
playing with."

GLIBC, which mayn't be the kernel, but which *IS* the interface that
practically everything else uses to access the Linux kernel, has been
growing into something of a monster.  Orc (aka David Parsons) was
griping about this a dozen years ago and I preferred to consider him a
bit of a crackpot back then.

In retrospect, he mayn't have been quite as wrong as we imagined.
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