OS and Software > All Things Unix > Linus Torvalds: 'Linux is bloated'

Linus Torvalds: 'Linux is bloated'

You sure that wasn't Ballmer in a Torvalds mask?

I understand what he's saying. I'm sure he's long ago lost the ability to hold the entire codebase for the kernel in his head.
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reply to Bink
Every operating system eventually grows up to be the fat bastard it despised when it was younger.

»harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

reply to Bink
Was this supposed to be news?

I'm pretty sure that most of us have noticed the creeping featurism.
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Over 50% of the kernel consists of drivers, so it's no surprise that this happens with the more devices Linux supports (yes, Linux supports more devices than Windows). They need to trim the old hardware drivers out of the kernel.

Many of the drivers are in modules, where they need not be loaded if the device is not present.

I am not convinced that bloat is merely a matter of an abundance of drivers. The evidence of creeping featurism is in the release notes.
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reply to KodiacZiller
What?! No, I have older hardware, and love that it still runs linux. I love that you can use older hardware for whatever. Home NAS, firewall almost anything.

reply to nwrickert

reply to Bink
Hmmm, I think the bloat has more to do with the various distros trying to be more user friendly and pack in features to compete with Windows and Mac. The great thing about Linux is that those who don't need all those features can simply compile a kernel for themselves without the bloat.
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said by Matt Asay :

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...it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux "huge and scary now," according to Torvalds.

Has Linux failed?

No. Of course not. It has simply grown as its adoption has expanded. This is the problem with success: you get pulled into an ever-widening array of tasks.

So, while Torvalds declared "We are definitely not the streamlined, hyper-efficient kernel I envisioned when I started writing Linux," Linux is also not the limited-purpose/function kernel he initially envisioned. It's powering everything from corporate data centers to over half of all new smartphones shipped, as the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin noted in his opening keynote.

One thing that I forgot to mention, but which is critical to the success of Linux, is that there really is no such thing as monolithic "Linux." Linux is highly modular and can be trimmed down/beefed up to fit a wide variety of applications...on the developers' terms, not Red Hat's, Novell's, Canonical's, etc.

So, unlike Windows, which can only be what Microsoft dictates, Linux can truly be all things to all people, as "fat" or as "skinny" as the developer wants it to be. Ubuntu is obese compared to sub-100 KB uClinux distributions, for example. Both serve different, and useful, purposes.

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said by Austin Modine :

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LinuxCon 2009 Linux creator Linus Torvalds says the open source kernel has become "bloated and huge," with no midriff-slimming diet plan in sight.

During a roundtable discussion at LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon this afternoon, moderator and Novell distinguished engineer James Bottomley asked Tovalds whether Linux kernel features were being released too fast, before the kernel is stabilized.

Citing an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases. "Is this a problem?" he asked.

"We're getting bloated and huge. Yes, it's a problem," said Torvalds.

Asked what the community is doing to solve this, he balked. "Uh, I'd love to say we have a plan," Torvalds replied to applause and chuckles from the audience. "I mean, sometimes it's a bit sad that we are definitely not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel that I envisioned 15 years ago...The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache footprint is scary. I mean, there is no question about that. And whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse."

He maintains, however, that stability is not a problem. "I think we've been pretty stable," he said. "We are finding the bugs as fast as we're adding them — even though we're adding more code."

Bottomley took this to mean that Torvalds views that the current level of integration acceptable under those terms. But Mr. Linux corrected him. "No. I'm not saying that," Torvalds answered. "Acceptable and avoidable are two different things. It's unacceptable but it's also probably unavoidable."

Among techies, Windows usually gets the bad wrap for bloat, but as Linux expands it reach, roping in so many additional features and devices, it can't help but suffer the same fate. What's different is how such problems are tackled.

"Okay, so the summary of this is that you expect that 12 per cent to be back to where it should be next year, and you expect someone else to come up with a plan to do it," joked Bottomley. "That's open source."

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reply to Bink

reply to KodiacZiller

reply to Bink
Sometimes bloated applications can do an awful lot. I never understood the hostility toward Microsoft for bloated software, and don't understand why there would be hostility toward Linux being bloated. Other words for bloated I can think of are: mature, capable, flexible, compatible, powerful.

Is Linux being more mature and capable really a bad thing?
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reply to Matt

reply to Bink
Could someone please hit me with a clue stick?

How is ICache footprint, absent a rigidly defined niche, a feature bloat metric? A follow-up lecture on micro vs. monolithic kernels and how the reality of context switching dictates ring-0 drivers to realize any kind of performance (ask Apple) would be great.

Thank you.

reply to cork1958