So The Register managed to incite a lot of discussion with a headline that plain-text e-mail is a barrier to entry for kernel development. While attention grabbing, this is actually not a new debate. Like a lot of tech arguments this one seems to come up on a cyclical basis. Maybe because maintainer summit didn’t happen this year it needed to come out elsewhere. I gave a few thoughts on twitter but this topic really deserves a longer look at the problem and what e-mail being a barrier really means.

What has 21 million lines of code, 4000 contributors, and more changes per day than most software projects have in months, or even years? The Linux kernel, of course. In this video, Greg Kroah-Hartman provides an inside view of how the largest, fastest software project of all absorbs so many changes while maintaining a high level of quality and stability.

KernelShark is a front end reader of trace-cmd(1) output. "trace-cmd record" and "trace-cmd extract" create a trace.dat (trace-cmd.dat(5)) file. kernelshark can read this file and produce a graph and list view of its data.