At LinuxCon in Portland, Ore., on Monday, Linus Torvalds said that Linux is getting bloated and with no plan in sight to change that.

Moderator James Bottomley cited an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, which showed that Linux performance had dropped about two percentage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases. He asked “Is this a problem?”

Torvalds: “We’re getting bloated and huge. Yes, it’s a problem.”

When asked what the Linux community is doing about it, Torvalds chuckled “I’d like to say we have a plan.” The audience laughed and applauded his comment.

Torvalds further said “Sometimes it’s a bit sad that were are definitely not the streamlined, small hyper efficient kernel I envisioned 15 years ago. The kernel is huge and bloated and our iCache footprint is scary. There’s no question about that, and whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse.”

He maintains, however, that stability is not a problem. “I think we’ve been pretty stable,” “We are finding the bugs as fast as we’re adding them — even though we’re adding more code.”

Regardless, no one is arguing Linux’s success. It is now used in a much wider range of applications than when it was first envisioned, running web servers, desktops, corporate data centers, and smart phones.

Also, Linux is highly modular. Since it is open source, it can be customized and optimized to fit an application. So if an application does not need some of the bloated functions, they can be taken out.

Torvalds commented on using user-space driver frameworks to reduce kernel bloat: “But you certainly would not want to take an existing kernel file system and then move it into user space. that would just be crazy. That’s LSD trippy, kind of. Don’t do that. A lot of the time it gets way harder to debug, we’re moving things into the kernel out of user space because of issues like that. We’re doing kernel mode setting, and doing a lot more of the logic of graphics in kernel space, actually makes it a lot easier for everybody because now you don’t have two broken pieces that don’t have a clue what the other piece is doing, and trying to debug across that kind of divide is horrible. The debugging advantages of doing drivers in user space have always been kind of suspect. I don’t think it’s really been true, except in very early kind of bring up meaning. Now people can do. You can do block devices in user space, you can do character device drivers in user space, you can do file systems in user space. Go wild. It’s not, I think, relevant for any major file system or driver but it’s there if you want to.”