Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman on kernel hacking
In issue 81 of Linux format, on the newsstands now, we have an interview with kernel coding guru Greg Kroah-Hartman. Famous for his work on drivers and the Linux USB subsystem, Greg now works for Novell doing what he loves -- hacking the kernel. Here's a few of the questions and answers:
LXF: It seems like no one likes writing drivers. Is that because it's so hard to do? Hard to debug?
GKH: I don't think so. I enjoy it, that's what I do. It's different; people traditionally look at drivers as low-end, bad, what we give to the new person coming into the company.
But a kernel is made up of three things: it will handle your memory, handle your I/O, then you're touching the hardware. And that's the drivers, everybody needs them: you have to have a driver to get your keyboard to work. They're very important, yet traditionally they've been deemed very low on the pecking order of what you write.
Hopefully, over the years Linus has got a bunch of really good people who have changed that, and our drivers are known for stability overall, so we're known for some really good stuff. Networking has been really, really good; SCSI, really good; USB is excellent - we support more new devices quicker than any other operating system. We did USB 2.0 support before anybody else did. Lots of other odd things we got before any other operating system. Bluetooth, before any other operating system.
LXF: Kernel changelogs are getting pretty big - I think for 2.4.10 it was 1.5 megabytes. That's huge.
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