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BCacheFS Banished; Reminder of The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate
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Hackaday ☛ BCacheFS Is Now A DKMS Module After Exile From The Linux Kernel
It’s been a tense few months for users of the BCacheFS filesystem, as amidst the occasional terse arguments and flowery self-praise on the Linux Kernel mailing list the future of this filesystem within the Linux kernel hung very much in the balance. After some initial confusion about what ‘externally maintained’ means in Linux parlance, it’s now clear that this means that BCacheFS has effectively been kicked out of the kernel as [Linus] promised and will ship as a DKMS module instead. The gory details of this change are discussed in a recent video by [Brodie Robertson].
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[Old] OReilly ☛ Appendix A - The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate
What follows in this appendix are what are known in the community as the Tanenbaum/Linus "Linux is obsolete" debates. Andrew Tanenbaum is a well-respected researcher who has made a very good living thinking about operating systems and OS design. In early 1992, noticing the way that the Linux discussion had taken over the discussion in comp.os.minix, he decided it was time to comment on Linux.
Although Andrew Tanenbaum has been derided for his heavy hand and misjudgements of the Linux kernel, such a reaction to Tanenbaum is unfair. When Linus himself heard that we were including this, he wanted to make sure that the world understood that he holds no animus towards Tanenbaum and in fact would not have sanctioned its inclusion if we had not been able to convince him that it would show the way the world was thinking about OS design at the time.