Zen kernel, what are advantages if any?

[Kevin Kofler]

Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> - a scheduler from Con Kolivas is developed for years and widely used,
> merging it is always denied until someone else creates a "similar"
> scheduler and it is accepted immediately
> 
> [the scheduler is a core part of the kernel, so why a freshly written
> one is preferred to a mature one?]

Because it was developed by Ingo Molnar, the maintainer of the scheduling 
portion of the kernel. He knows what he's doing. He also provided a few 
technical reasons of why his Completely Fair Scheduler is better than the 
Con Kolivas staircase schedulers it was inspired by.

> - the reiser4 filesystem has been released in 2004 (!) and has never
> been accepted; ext4, instead, has been basically developed inside
> the mainline kernel and a similar thing happens for btrfs

Because reiser4 is designed in a way which the Linux kernel developers said 
is unacceptable and the reiser4 developers refused to change it. It does too 
much in the file system instead of letting the other layers of the Linux 
file system stack handle things (kinda like ZFS, for which the relevant 
Linux kernel maintainers said they'd reject it even if it were acceptably 
licensed due to this "everything in the file system" design).

> [a filesystem is something totally isolated, only people using it
> can have problems; the rejection was justified by saying that Hans
> Reiser is a difficult guy to cope with (which is probably true)]

FYI, Hans Reiser is now in prison for having killed his ex-wife and unlikely 
to ever get out of it. (They're serious when they say "life in prison" over 
in California.)

> Tuxonice is just another of the big "but why not?" denied projects.

There were concrete technical objections there too.

        Kevin Kofler