academia contribution to the kernel

[Prasad Joshi]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:05 AM, Javier Martinez Canillas
<martinez.javier at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions
> that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan.
> Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question
> I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies
> sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this
> list to know what you people think about.
>
> My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible?
>

Leave contribution, frankly speaking academic experts lack the
knowledge of many of new features. For example few days back I was
speaking about virtualization with a professor in my University. She
thought I am talking about "Virtual Reality" and started telling me
the work she is doing, obviously I couldn't understand whatever she
was blurring. When I joined the University, I used to talk with
professors about ZFS, BTRFS but, to my surprise they had no idea about
them.

What I have found though about these people, they are good in their
field and they are mostly involved in writing the cryptic research
papers, god knows who read these papers. I also see a lot of PhD
students, but they follow the same footsteps that their supervisor is
following.

Any ways my supervisor never discourages me from working on Linux. Good for me.

> In the last linux foundation report about who is sponsoring the Linux
> kernel development, academia contribution was less than 1.5%.
>
> Being involved in the academia as a PhD student I have my own
> conclusions that are very similar to the ones exposed by Thomas
> Gleixner in his lwn.net article "academia v. reality"
> (http://lwn.net/Articles/397422/).
>
> How can the Linux foundation and companies behind Linux improve this?
> Academia has too much resources (both human and financial) that can be
> used to improve Linux.
>

Academic people, I guess are evaluated using the number of papers they
have published. I have not seen people publishing papers in Linux
kernel development community. They are completely on opposite ends.

Academics might not like to work on Linux kernel because of the Open
Source. They are always concerned with funding, fear of not generating
money out of open source projects might be another reason. If Linux
foundation can provide research funding, Universities would be
interested in working on Linux kernel.

Anyways there are Universities doing research on Linux kernel as well.
For example CEPH file system started in an University, Xen is yet
another example.

> LTTng and Linux Checkpoint/Restart (linux-cr) are two examples that
> academia can produce features to enhance the kernel.
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> Javier Martínez Canillas
> (+34) 682 39 81 69
> PhD Student in High Performance Computing
> Computer Architecture and Operating System Department (CAOS)
> Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
> Barcelona, Spain
>
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