LWN - How Google uses Linux

by philjr • 17 years ago

36 11 17 years ago

philjr2• 17 years ago

First of all, quite surprised Google is using perforce (woah!), but as the comments suggest, people internally are using a git-p4 bridge.

Secondly the hooks to let them tie I/O requests back to specific applications sounds funky, is there something in the wild that does this today?

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

I'm not. There are few source control systems capable of supporting development at google's scale, Perforce is one of them. It may be unhip (compared to modern DVCS systems), it may be a bit clunky (arguably it's less clunky than git), but it is definitely capable.

philjr2• 17 years ago

The impression I was left with was that their p4 stuff was for kernel source only (i.e. for the 30 or so developers that are using it), so I'm not sure if I see the big deal in using perforce in that scenario.

gaius• 17 years ago

What's wrong with Perforce? Sure it's "proprietary" but it's pretty solid and scales to huge organizations and codebases. I like having "one repository" but that's subjective I suppose.

I'm pretty sure DTrace can do that.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

It's a pity google keeps so much of the kernel secret sauce to itself, it would be nice if they gave back at least as much as they took from the kernel.

cdibona• 17 years ago

That's impossible, we don't change enough of it to give a similar amount back. We could give back more (and we're trying to get there), but as you read in the article much of what we do is back porting.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

There might be plenty of other people interested in that back ported stuff. Why make the decision for them ?

By opening it up categorically you are bound to make a bunch of people very happy, and you might even 'inspire' the kernel maintainers to do the 'right thing'.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

They can save on testing if they will post their patches to mainstream branch.

ntoshev• 17 years ago

Previous submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905547

LWN - How Google uses Linux

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