Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263317AbUJ2NWV (ORCPT ); Fri, 29 Oct 2004 09:22:21 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263320AbUJ2NWV (ORCPT ); Fri, 29 Oct 2004 09:22:21 -0400 Received: from mail.tmr.com ([216.238.38.203]:46737 "EHLO gaimboi.tmr.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263317AbUJ2NTe (ORCPT ); Fri, 29 Oct 2004 09:19:34 -0400 Message-ID: <4182436B.20600@tmr.com> Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 09:19:39 -0400 From: Bill Davidsen Organization: TMR Associates Inc, Schenectady NY User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: William Lee Irwin III CC: Chuck Ebbert <76306.1226@compuserve.com>, "michael@optusnet.com.au" , "'linux-kernel'" , Massimo Cetra , Ed Tomlinson , "Marcos D. Marado Torres" , John Richard Moser , Alan Cox Subject: Re: My thoughts on the "new development model" References: <200410280907_MC3-1-8D5A-FF57@compuserve.com> <20041028150329.GK12934@holomorphy.com> In-Reply-To: <20041028150329.GK12934@holomorphy.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2195 Lines: 50 William Lee Irwin III wrote: > On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 at 00:13:44 -0700 William Lee Irwin III wrote: > >>>I'd expect vastly less than 1%, starting from the arch count, and then >>>making some conservative guesses about drivers. Drivers probably >>>actually take it down to far, far less than 1%. > > > On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 09:04:41AM -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote: > >> Sure, but pretty much each installation uses a different 1%. >> If there's a bug in there it's bound to hit someone; that's >>what makes OS writing so difficult. (And that's why "It works >>for me" is not really a useful statement about the overall quality >>of an operating system.) > > > 99.99% of users use one arch, i386. > 99.99% of users use one disk driver, IDE. > The intersection of these users is probably well over 99.999% of all > users. > > Then probably a small list of secondary drivers varies. Statistically, > users with anything but the crappiest x86 s**tboxen and a tiny subset > of all drivers (arjan's 20) are hopelessly outnumbered. Sorry, i386 is really a pool of Pentium, Athlon, and Opteron chips, with a witches brew of HT, 64bit extensions to 32 bit chips, and the like. Connected by a constantly changing set of Intel, SiS, VIA and other shipsets, and getting storage from IDE and SATA drives. Not to mention using a vast array of CD and DVD drives and several major flavors of USB methods with minor variations of each, and driving their consoles with at least a half-dozen popular video chipsets with drivers of various shades of openness. You don't even reach 99.99% with small-endian, there are more assorted RISC chips in use than that. I guess you're safe with twos complement arithmetic, although I cringed at Linus' recent "find a power of two" code which depends on it. Diversity, thy name is Linux! -- bill davidsen CTO TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/