2010-08-11 16:08 | fche blog tech systemtap is not a "rejected kernel patch"
If this article quotes Ted Ts’o correctly, we have a problem.
The quote:
Ted Ts’o, a Linux kernel maintainer who joined Google in January 2010, said both Novell and Red Hat ship patches that were rejected by the Linux kernel but no one describes their distributions as Linux forks.
It’s nothing new,” he said. “Novell has a number of patches and SUSE ships with code somebody rejected but no one says Novell forked the Linux code. Red Hat ships SystemTap and no one says Red Hat forked the kernel.”
Ted ought to know that systemtap is not a kernel patch. It has never been a kernel patch. It has never been posted to LKML as if it were a kernel patch. This makes his anecdote a lousy simile to Android, whose kernel does contain controversial patches. Portraying systemtap as if it were “rejected” or had any similarity to a kernel fork gives a completely false impression of the nature and history of the project.
I hope there was further context given at the conference, or else he was misquoted. Otherwise, the conference attendees were mislead, and our project was needlessly slighted.
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I was quoted correctly, and I did mis-speak. My apologies. What I was thinking of was things like the utrace patches, which is needed for systemtap to trace user space code. Unfortunately, I didn’t request permission to “revise and extend” my comments, and even if I did, I doubt the journalist from ZDnet would have obliged. :-)
(There is also of course a lot of code which should be in the kernel, if SystemTap is going to work well with upstream bleeding edge kernels without the SystemTap team scrambling to fix issues caused by changes during the merge window.)
In any case, the high level bit of what I was trying to say is that both distributions ship code that have been rejected by the mainline kernel. I also mentioned SLES shipping the DMAPI patch, as I was trying to be fair to both distributions. It wasn’t my intention to slam SystemTap, as much as to illustrate that simply shipping out-of-tree patches is not necessarily grounds for saying, "OMG! $COMPANY is forking the Linux kernel." Theodore Ts'o (Email) (URL) - 2010-08-11 17:20
Thank you for your revision and comments. I agree in general. Frank - 2010-08-11 17:43