So you're a Linux kernel developer? Name all subsystems.
Pia Eichinger, Ralf Ramsauer, Stefanie Scherzinger, Wolfgang Mauerer
https://lca2021.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/100/
It’s needless to mention that the kernel is obviously split into several subsystems. But what defines a subsystem? An entry in MAINTAINERS? Then there would be more than 2000 of them, which is clearly not the case.
As there is no official definition of ›subsystems‹, we want to identify them: We are interested of what subsystems the kernel actually consists of and how they are related to each other. This is helpful for newcomers, to get a better insight in the kernel, but also for industrial vendors performing development process analysis.
This promises benefits for developers and the community. But beyond this, a precise documentation and definition of subsystems is also necessary for upcoming challenges like certifications in safety critical environments (for instance, as aspired by the Linux Foundation’s ELISA project). Proper documentation also eases general quality ensurance, provides help for longterm maintenance, and lowers the initial learning curve for newcomers. Therefore, we decided to take a look at the bigger picture. Quite literally, actually.
Our talk discusses methods to visualise the entire repository subsystem topology using graphs based on data mining in the kernel. It measures intersections of responsibility for MAINTAINERS entries, and clusters them based on overlap intensity, effectively detecting de-facto subsystems. It reveals sensible, though sometimes surprising, structures, compares the differences between de-facto and documented subsystems, and shows numerous possibilities for using the data, ranging from improvements to the development process to formal safety-critical certification efforts.
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Sat Jan 23 11:40:00 2021 at Tux Theatre
by linux.conf.au
linux foundation
