The developer, named Ingo Molnar, has announced the project «Fast Kernel Headers«. With him, seek clean and rewrite the hierarchy of Linux kernel headers and their dependencies. Specifically, Linux contains around 10,000 .h header files with the include / and arch / * / include hierarchies. Over the years, Molnar claims that this has become a serious and complicated cross-dependency problem called «Dependency Hell«.
2,200 commit modifications
And what is the solution? Well, Molnar affirms that they have to be done around 2,200 commit modifications In the code. At first glance, he underestimated the number of commits that had to be tweaked, as upon further analysis he discovered that the code is more convoluted than he thought, which is normal given the 30 years of development behind him.
Molnar has been working on these changes for a while now, and says the new Quick Header system has improved around a 50 and 80% performance when it comes to compile the kernel on supported architectures and depending on configuration. This greatly improves compiling efficiency and overall performance of devices using Linux.
More than half of the kernel will be modified
Although he has identified 25 subtrees Y 2,200 commits that must be modified, Molnar recognizes that the process will not be able to stop there. The changes will affect virtually all Linux programs. Therefore, he estimates that this new system will cause modifications to more than half of the kernel source files that exist today. In total, it would have affected 25,288 files, 178,024 insertions and 74,720 deletions.
At the user level, this would not initially improve the speed of use of the operating system, but it would have an impact on developers being able to compile faster, making it easier and faster to release updates, patches and improvements for the different operating systems based on Linux. Enter this in the main kernel code It is something that will take months, and surely it will not be without problems. We’ll see what Linus Torvalds thinks about it.