On Tuesday 04 October 2005 02:47 pm, Marc Perkel wrote:
> The bootup sequence of Linux is pathetic. What an ungodly mess. The
> FSTAB file needs to go and a smarter system needs to be developed. I
> know this isn't entirely a kernel issue but it is somewhat related.
>
> I think development needs to be done to make the kernel cleaner and
> smarter rather than just bigger and faster. It's time to look at what
> users need and try to make Linux somewhat more windows like in being
> able to smartly recover from problems. Perhaps better error messages
> that your traditional kernel panic or hex dump screen of death.
>
> The big challenge for Linux is to be able to put it in the hands of
> people who don't want to dedicate their entire life to understanding all
> the little quirks that we have become used to. The slogan should be
> "this just works" and is intuitive.
I agree with the basic sentiment here.
fstab is pretty traditional - and you're right, it really isn't a kernel thing
per se. Let's not forget the value of simplicity though. fstab works and does
its job well. I do think it would be interesting for a distribution to
experiment with different approaches, though -- something with the emerging
hardware abstraction layer perhaps.
As for error messages... the equivalent of the Linux kernel panic is basically
the Windows BSOD. Neither one of them should appear in the day to day use of
the system as they indicate bugs. Linux is actually the clear winner here, I
think, because a Windows BSOD gives you a single hex code and no indication
of what happened, except for very vague codes like
"PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA". I'd much rather have a backtrace :) In any
case, I'm watching the work on kdump with a keen interest.
Really, I think the whole issue of usability isn't tied directly to the
kernel. The kernel has been making leaps and bounds in making this easy for
userspace to deal with (where the approaches to solve the problem belong).
Sysfs is an obvious great example.
Work on dbus and HAL should give us good improvements in these areas. One
remaining challenge I see is system configuration - each daemon tends to
adopt its own syntax for configuration, which means that providing a GUI for
novice users to manage these systems means attacking each problem separately
and in full. Now I certainly wouldn't advocate a Windows-style registry,
because I think it's full of obvious problems. Nevertheless, it would be nice
to have some kind of configuration editor abstraction library that had some
sort of syntax definition database to allow for some interesting work on
GUIs.
In any case, I think pretty much all of this work lives outside the kernel.
There is one side note I'd make about booting - my own boot process has to
wait forever for my Adaptec SCSI controller to wake up. It would be
interesting if bootup initialization tasks could be organized into dependency
levels and run in parallel, though as I'm a beginner to the workings of the
kernel I'm not entirely sure how possible this would be.
Cheers,
Chase Venters
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
