[ Thanks to Jeremy
Katz for this link. ]
“This is the first in a series of interviews with kernel
developers. Ingo Molnar is a kernel developer employeed by RedHat
Software. He is the maintainer of the low-level X86 SMP support and
new-style RAID. He was also involved in the work to make 2.3.x
support massive amounts of RAM, and has several patches to decrease
latency within the kernel. I’d like to also take this chance to
thank James Manning for some pointers as to questions to ask.”
“One question that comes up whenever you are mentioned is your
work with software raid. When do you think that this will actually
make it into the mainstream Linus kernel?”
“Well, one important thing here is that I’ve been doing ‘dual’
RAID releases for quite some time, ie. I’m releasing the new RAID
code for the latest 2.0 and 2.2 kernels in parallel, without doing
any ‘backporting’ or ‘forward porting’. In the heart of this is a
set of defines, macros and inline functions that emulate 2.2
behavior in 2.0 kernels without polluting 2.0 or 2.2 namespace. The
core RAID code itself is completely identical in the 2.0 and 2.2
RAID patch, and there are no version-dependent #ifdefs in the core
RAID code. Considering this it’s I think understandable why I’m not
too nervous about maintaining for different kernels – when 2.4
comes out I’ll release for 3 kernels (2.0, 2.2 and 2.4).”