Kernel thread scheduling

[Jeff Haran]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2015 11:48 AM
> To: Ruben Safir
> Cc: Jeff Haran; kernelnewbies at kernelnewbies.org
> Subject: Re: Kernel thread scheduling
> 
> On Thu, 16 Apr 2015 14:28:59 -0400, Ruben Safir said:
> 
> > >> Others may come to different conclusions. I use www.google.com on a
> regular basis even though I can't download it.
> 
> > That is not even a good analogy.
> 
> We're comparing closed Coverty-as-a-service with closed Google-as-a-
> service.
> Seems like a good analogy to me.
> 
> I'm failing to see the moral difference between using Google SaaS to look to
> see if anybody else has reported a particular kernel error and using Coverty
> SaaS to examine kernel code.
> 
> As you yourself said:
> 
> > If everyone depended on this Software as a Service then you would have
> > a nice walled garden to the Kernel Code.
> 
> Why do you object to Coverty when Google is almost certainly more
> depended on by kernel developers?

Not only that, but demonizing Coverity over this is quite unfair. They provide for free to the world the results of their static code analysis of many open source projects, Linux included. Granted, Coverity's system isn't perfect, it does generate false positives but I know from personally quite embarrassing experience that it does find real bugs in code that I've written and looked at hundreds of times that I didn't see and its pointing out to anybody who would care to look thousands of potential kernel bugs. They also have this posterior-kicking code browser that's better than all of the free competition that I know of. If somebody knows of any better, please let me know.

I often read emails on this list from people looking to help and get started in kernel development. Well, here's a good place to start. Submit patches to fix some of those Coverity identified kernel bugs. Some of them will be false positives, but some of them will be the real thing.

And just for the record, I have no financial interest in Coverity or its parent company. I've been a user of their system at a couple of companies I've worked for now, but that and my usage of their free service is the only connection I have with them.

Jeff Haran