Interview with a Kernel Hacker, Dec 16, 2002

Robert M. Love Interview

In short, 2.6 should be "nicer" on the desktop but for normal machines with normal workloads the improvement will not be huge since 2.4 was not that bad to begin with. But 2.6 will certainly be excellent.

Apparently unconcerned with the symbolism, the Linux community is marching toward its self-imposed Oct. 31 feature-freeze date for the newest operating system kernel. While what will be Version 2.6 has many laudable improvements, there's still plenty of post-Halloween maturation needed so that Linux stops frightening end users—and doesn't appear to be masquerading as an enterprise-ready platform.

"We're pretty close to done with what will be 2.6...We're actually looking at the second quarter 2003 for the real 2.6 release," Torvalds told a group of Linux aficionados aboard a "Geek Cruise" in the Caribbean. CNET News.com reviewed a recording of Torvalds' talk.

Marcello Tosatti, 2.4 kernel maintainer, reports that 2.4.19-rc5 is now 2.4.19 stable.

Guillaume Boissiere, maintainer of the Linux Kernel 2.5 Status list, recently posted a new version of his list divided into three categories: "likely to be merged before the Halloween feature freeze", "likely not to be ready by Halloween", and "ongoing work". He prefaced his list by asking, "Do you think the breakdown is realistic?".

A recent discussion on the lkml debated whether the 2.6 and 2.7 kernels should be released at the same time instead of first stabilizing the 2.6 "stable tree" then branching the 2.7 "development tree". The theory behind the proposition is to keep "new" things from going into 2.6 once it is released, focusing instead only on making it stable. On the flip side of this argument is the possibility that with a 2.7 kernel in development, there will be too little focus on stabilizing the 2.6 kernel.

The resulting debate makes for an interesting read. Much of the thread follows.

Marcelo Tosatti, a Brazilian developer working for Linux distributor Conectiva, took over maintenance of the current "stable" Linux kernel, version 2.4, last autumn. He took over from Alan Cox, a major figure in the Linux community and long-time maintainer.

In an interview with ZDNet UK, Tosatti talked about his daily job of applying kernel patches from all around the Internet, the way ahead for Linux and his U.S. visa problems.

I was student systems programmer in MIT Project Athena during the height of the UNIX wars and saw firsthand how incompatibilities between the various UNIXes allowed Microsoft to dominate the desktop. So as a result, I've always thought that the LSB is incredibly important for the Linux community.

Tosatti: I wouldn't have switched it at that time. Something about Linus that is a problem is that a lot of things come from his mood. He'll just say, "Oh, this is good: Apply. This is good: Apply." He should not accept some of the patches he does. He accepts some patches too early, without thinking too much about them. He does not have the time to really care about some stuff. For example, with Andrea's VM, he just got one VM and then he switched it to another: Boom! He didn't think about all the issues involved with this. I wouldn't have done that the way he did.

In an interview with ZDNet UK, the Linux 'kernel hacker' gives his views on the GPL, 64-bit computing and why grandmothers should want to use Linux

For the past month -- and for the next 500 days or so -- Free Radio Linux will transmit a computerized reading of the Linux operating system.

"We really wanted to develop something which was transparently about audio on the Internet, which is why we came up with Free Radio Linux ," said Adam Hyde, one of the website's creators. "What we thought we would do is build a speech bot that would read out the entire Linux source code, live over the Internet."

He said Linus has "reached his stress limit" and that no one person can deal with the number of kernel patches coming forward from kernel maintainers. Patches, many of which would help in the further development of Linux, are being dropped without good reason, Raymond observed.

Programmers have found a vulnerability in Linux that could allow protective firewall software to grant malicious computer users access to protected networks.

The flaw, which affects versions 2.4.14 through 2.4.18-pre9 of the Linux kernel, is in a component of the Netfilter firewall software. The component is involved when two computer users chat directly with each other using the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system.

Ok, DAMN. I missed the -rc4 patch in 2.4.18. Real sorry about that.

The preemptible Linux kernel patch that was originally introduced by MontaVista Software and more recently championed by Robert Love has been merged by Linus Torvalds into the main linux development-kernel tree, beginning version v2.5.4-pre6. This adds a far greater degree of real-time responsiveness to the standard Linux kernel, by reducing interrupt latencies while kernel functions are executing.

Several AM, FM, shortwave, and Internet radio stations Monday began broadcasting an automated voice reading the source for the Linux kernel--all 4,141,432 lines of it. Reading the entire kernel will take an estimated 14,253.43 hours, or 593.89 days.

As a reader from Australia noted in an e-mail to me, "evolution is by definition an undirected process with natural selection." You might, however, argue that there is undoubtedly some direction in the Linux kernel development. In the context of evolution Torvalds represents natural selection, and kernel developers changing the code represent mutation, albeit a poor representation because the developers have some sense and purpose in what they do, while mutation "in nature" has absolutely none.

One "patch penguin" scales no better than I do. In fact, I will claim that most of them scale a whole lot worse.

In short: don't try to come up with a "patch penguin". Instead try to help existing maintainers, or maybe help grow new ones. THAT is the way to scalability.

Torvalds added that some of the tension comes from his refusal to apply patches that aren't properly submitted and that aren't from people he trusts. Those people, known as maintainers, are programmers designated to lead the development of certain Linux subsystems, such as networking, the help system, and graphics.

Okay everybody, this is getting rediculous. Patches FROM MAINTAINERS are getting dropped on the floor on a regular basis. This is burning out maintainers and is increasing the number of different kernel trees (not yet a major fork, but a lot of cracks and fragmentation are showing under the stress). Linus needs an integration lieutenant, and he needs one NOW.

An almost two-year old bug in AMD's Athlon and Duron processors has been found to trip up Linux users.

Users of the 2.4 kernel have been informed that a problem exists in the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) video functionality when used in conjunction with an Athlon or Duron processor.

So, what does all of this mean for me? It means that after five months of battling the new, better-than-fresh-butter, enterprise-ready 2.4 kernel, I am moving my customer back to the stodgy, conservative, more-enterprise-ready-than-2.4-has-been-since-its-release-almost-a-year-ago, 2.2 kernel-based Red Hat 6.2.

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