Rich Freeman via plug on 4 Jan 2022 09:55:13 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] Linux: A solo developer is attempting to clean up 30 years of mess


On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 12:36 PM Lynn Bradshaw via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> https://www.techradar.com/news/linux-a-solo-developer-is-attempting-to-clean-up-30-years-of-mess
>
> The goal is creating a much more svelte and better-organized, more
> maintainable Linux kernel. The article says that application code will
> run substantially faster after the reform effort. Would that also
> potentially affect memory bloat?

Actually, it says, "All of this makes very little difference to the
end-user, as they won’t see any specific changes."  (I'd probably add
the caveat that this assumes the end-user isn't compiling software
that uses linux headers.)

These are just C header files.  They expect optimizing them to
increase compiler performance (I imagine especially on smaller files),
which makes sense.  When the compiler has to read 10k lines of
includes that takes time even if they do nothing, and if you have 10
levels of typedefs or whatever nested that of course is work for the
compiler.

In the end though the actual data types of variables probably aren't
going to change as a result of this.

Since many of these headers are used by userspace and the system call
interface they can't change the actual data types.  They're only
changing how they're expressed in the headers.  Obviously they need to
do it in a way that doesn't impact every C program that includes
something from linux-headers.

-- 
Rich
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