There may be no single organization which runs more Linux systems than Google. But the kernel development community knows little about how Google uses Linux and what sort of problems are encountered there. Google’s Mike Waychison traveled to Tokyo to help shed some light on this situation; the result was an interesting view on what it takes to run Linux in this extremely demanding setting.

Mike started the talk by giving the developers a good laugh: it seems that Google manages its kernel code with Perforce. He apologized for that. There is a single tree that all developers commit to. About every 17 months, Google rebases its work to a current mainline release; what follows is a long struggle to make everything work again. Once that’s done, internal “feature” releases happen about every six months.

This way of doing things is far from ideal; it means that Google lags far behind the mainline and has a hard time talking with the kernel development community about its problems.

Seen at LWN.net