Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751851Ab2BYXoD (ORCPT ); Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:44:03 -0500 Received: from mail-ey0-f174.google.com ([209.85.215.174]:35856 "EHLO mail-ey0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751289Ab2BYXoA (ORCPT ); Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:44:00 -0500 Authentication-Results: mr.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of jidong.xiao@gmail.com designates 10.14.184.3 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=jidong.xiao@gmail.com; dkim=pass header.i=jidong.xiao@gmail.com MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20120225205540.GA29303@kroah.com> References: <20120224153811.GA16535@kroah.com> <20120224165448.GA8751@kroah.com> <20120225205540.GA29303@kroah.com> Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:43:58 -0500 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Can we move device drivers into user-space? From: Jidong Xiao To: Greg KH Cc: Kernel development list Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2094 Lines: 44 On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Greg KH wrote: > On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 02:23:07PM -0500, Jidong Xiao wrote: >> Hi, Greg, >> >> These two studies support my point. If the first one is too old, then >> the second one should be more convincing. To save your time, you can >> take a look at their conclusion first. >> >> An Empirical Study of Operating Systems Errors >> http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/metrics-sosp-01.pdf >> >> Faults in Linux: Ten Years Later >> http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Suman.Saha/src/asplos11.pdf > > This second paper proves my point, it's funny that you tried to use it > to prove yours, you obviously must not have read the conclusion... > > Anyway, any paper that goes "look at all of these problems in the code!" > and isn't instantly followed by patches fixing ALL of those problems by > the authors of the paper, should be ignored as a troll masquerading as a > "study". > My point was "a significant portion of kernel crash incidents are due to bugs in drivers". You said no. I did *not* say bugs in device drivers are the dominant factor of kernel crashes/faults. So at least my point matches with the conclusion of the second paper. You can certainly say these academic studies are meaningless because they are not telling the whole story, but you can not deny the fact that because of the large code base, it is the almost impossible to eliminate all the bugs/problems from device drivers. That's why people are doing research to mitigate this problem, even though moving device drivers to user space may not be a good idea, or it is unrealistic in Linux, those researchers as well as their results deserve more respect. Everyone in the whole community, including kernel developers and researchers, shares the same goal, namely, improving the kernel code quality. Regards Jidong -- 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/