Video Interview With Linus On Linux 2.7

daria42 writes "ZDNet Australia has put up a video interview of Linux creator Linus Torvalds talking about the kernel development process, explaining why the unexpected resilience of kernel version 2.6 has delayed the move to 2.7." From the interview: "One of the original worries was that we would not be able to make big changes within the confines of the development model... I always said that if there is something so fundamental that everything will break then we will start at 2.7 at that point... We have been able to do fairly invasive things even while not actually destabilizing the kernel... Having stable and unstable in parallel: I think it used to be a great model, and I think we may see that the kernel has actually become more mature and stable and it just doesn't seem to be that great a model, for the kernel."

Too bad Flash 9 isn't released for linux yet

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

How difficult is it to release a video about linux kernel development in a format that is easy to watch by people running linux? At least use flash 7...no need to blow their minds talking about ogg/theora.

Ummmm

[aussersterne (212916)]

Visit the download page [adobe.com] from a Linux browser and you can download Flash 9 for Linux now. And P.S. the beta was out for months before this was...

Re:

[creimer (824291)]

If it's not working on the Mac, download and install. There's separate versions for the Intel and PPC.

Re:

[zsau (266209)]

Umm... still doesn't work from PPC/Linux. And considering that's the platform Torvalds develops on, you'd think they could at least release the video in a format he could watch from his own computer. It's not hard to release a video in MPEG format people!

Re:

[xtracto (837672)]

And considering that's the platform Torvalds develops on, you'd think they could at least release the video in a format he could watch from his own computer

Duh! Everyone knows Mr. Trovalds develops on a PPC/Linux machine but his home machine is still a Wintel one

*runs*

Re:

[Kjella (173770)]

And P.S. the beta was out for months before this was...

Yes, it was and I installed it because of how horribly outdated Flash 7 was, and it was pre-alpha quality. If you navigated to another page before the current one was done loading, your browser would freeze 50% of the time with no recourse but to kill it.

Re:

[punkrockguy318 (808639)]

Flash 9 was released for linux today [adobe.com]. Enjoy :)

Re:

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

Talk about timing. It does seem to be x86 only, however. Seems like it will be a while until I can ditch the 32 bit firefox.

Re:

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

So close, and yet so far:

  * Auto installing 32bit plugins...
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING: Flash Player 9 beta 1 detected and rejected
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING: Flash Player 9 beta 1 detected and rejected

This is an awesome program nonetheless.

Re:

[EzInKy (115248)]

I just tested it out on my amd64 system using the nspluginwrapper and it seems to work fine. I didn't use the installer-script though, just untarred and copied libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt to /opt/netscape/plugins.

Re:

[jazir1979 (637570)]

i believe it autodects your OS based on your user agent, you insensitive anonymous coward. why are you in windows??

Re:Too bad Flash 9 isn't released for linux yet

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

i believe it autodects your OS based on your user agent, you insensitive anonymous coward. why are you in windows??

Maybe he uses the user agent switcher [mozilla.org] to work around broken websites, you insensitive... logged in user

Re:

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

Bleh. Now that Java will soon be freed, I'd rather see something akin to Cortado than the continued reliance on proprietary garbage.

True, but that would really blow their minds. Sometimes progress happens in baby-steps.

Re:

[physicsnick (1031656)]

The CVS version of Gnash has started getting video playback support; it's only a matter of time before it has full support for YouTube, Google Video, etc. Once this happens, we can happily accept Flash video in the open-source desktop.

On a somewhat related note, hopefully by August the nouveau project will deliver an open source 3D driver for NVidia cards; between nouveau and Gnash, I'll soon be able to completely eliminate binary blobs on this machine. Here's hoping it happens sooner rather than later :D

Re:

[zsau (266209)]

By the way, just lest anyone thing Nouveau and Gnash are the sort of thing only "RMS-wannabe free software fanbois" would want, us people using Linux on PPC (and we count Torvalds among our ranks!) have no binaries blobs available from NVidia and no binary flash players available from Adobe. Nouveau and Gnash are absolutely essential for us to be able to keep up.

well

[User 956 (568564)]

Having stable and unstable in parallel: I think it used to be a great model

It certainly works when dual-booting.

Another interview with Linus?

[Xenographic (557057)]

Does it contain anything inflammatory about the GPL v3? If not, I'm not interested. :]

Translation

[ClamIAm (926466)]

In my opinion, the real reason for no 2.7 is:

If we open up an unstable branch, I have less testers. --Linus Torvalds

I'm not saying the 2.6 series is unstable or anything, either. However as I watch Linux's development from the sidelines, I get the impression that most policy decisions Linus makes are designed to make his life easier. See also: Bitkeeper.

Re:Translation

[springbox (853816)]

It's harder to get a kernel that works nicely if a lot of people end up flocking to another version. This would leave 2.6 in a bad position because fewer people would be finding and reporting bugs, critical or not. One person can only do so much. Linux is very much a community project that needs participants to work well.

Corporate development OWNS the 2.6 kernel

[poopie (35416)]

The resiliency of the 2.6 kernel is most certainly due to corporate involvement in the development of and support for Linux. Companies can't design, build, test, and support product for a moving target.

If anyone wanted to seriously break the Linux kernel ABI, I don't think corporate interests or major distros would support it or follow.

OSes or platforms seem to change rapidly up until the point they reach a critical mass - at which point, the next ABI change is cause for general revolt. After that, $ENTITY learns their lesson and vows to never significantly break backwards compatibility again.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

WTF are you talking about? The kernel ABI gets "broken" practically every version. It's a bit wacky if you ask me. Make a good design and stick with it guys.

Re:Corporate development OWNS the 2.6 kernel

[bfields (66644)]

If anyone wanted to seriously break the Linux kernel ABI, I don't think corporate interests or major distros would support it or follow.

The ABI rules haven't changed at all: the user-kernel ABI (system-call interface) is supposed to be backwards compatible indefinitely; the internal ABI (e.g. for drivers) changes without warning whenever it's convenient.

What's changed is the release cycle--we no longer have this odd-numbered fork where the kernel's half-broken for years at a time.... Which is a good thing.

Resilience?

[SuperBanana (662181)]

explaining why the unexpected resilience of kernel version 2.6 has delayed the move to 2.7.

Uh...resilience?

2.6 releases have "shipped" numerous times with some serious bugs, probably because Linus and company have let lots of people slip major new features into the 2.6 kernel, when it's supposed to be stable. 2.6 kernels regularly make it SEVERAL "point" releases into each point release:

• 2.6.19.2
• 2.6.18.6
• 2.6.17.14 (!)
• 2.6.16.37 (thirty seven releases. From 3/20/06 to 12/28/06. That's one release, on average, once a week.)
• 2.6.15.7

Go and look at the timestamps on 'em on ftp.kernel.org. Some of the sub-versions are just a few days apart. How the hell are end-users supposed to know when the kernel is ACTUALLY useable, if there are THIRTY SEVEN bug-fix releases?

One of the more amazing bugs involved a bug in md that would hose raid partitions, and I assure you, it was not the only serious filesystem bug. I lost a reiserfs partition thanks to a half-baked 2.6 release.

Re:Resilience?

[by Anonymous Coward]

The point releases (or .y releases as they are sometimes called), are a new feature of the 2.6.x release cycle that's intended to get fixes in the hands of users faster. These are always small changes, usually only a handful of line changes in the diff.

The 2.6.16 kernel is a special case. One of the core kernel devs decided to try an experiment to maintain a kernel release for an extended period of time. He continues to provide small fixes at a very regular rate without porting in the newer features of the more current kernel releases. This has only happened for 2.6.16 and there are no plans that I know of to offer extended maintenance on any other kernel release.

Re:Resilience?

[Arimus (198136)]

The use of the word experiment is a bad choice of words.... the 2.6.16.y releases are all stable releases but instead of batching up fixes and implementing them maybe weeks or months after discovery 2.6.16 was used to test the idea of rapid fixing of the kernel. The experiment was in the process of kernel fixes rather than experimental code.

Re:Resilience?

[notamisfit (995619)]

In the interests of fairness, about 20 or so of those 37 bugfix releases were done after 2.6.17 was released as stable (2.6.16 is still being maintained as a "super-stable" type kernel). Bugfix releases pretty much seem to be a non-issue, considering that most people are going to be using the kernel provided with the distribution, as opposed to a vanilla one.

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[bfields (66644)]

Go and look at the timestamps on 'em on ftp.kernel.org. Some of the sub-versions are just a few days apart. How the hell are end-users supposed to know when the kernel is ACTUALLY useable, if there are THIRTY SEVEN bug-fix releases?

They release those pretty frequently; each often consists of very few patches. But the kernel does have tons of bugs--it's a complicated piece of software.

That doesn't mean any one user is likely to hit any of them--most are in drivers, most triggered only by particular work

Re:

[JebusIsLord (566856)]

I remember 2.4 was a disaster, actually... the whole VM system got turfed and replaced somewhere around 2.4.8 because it was broken by design, and something drastic had to be done.

This is just from memory, someone with a better memory could probably be more specific. But anyhow, the 2.6 releases have been pretty smooth.

Re:Resilience?

[mcrbids (148650)]

Go and look at the timestamps on 'em on ftp.kernel.org. Some of the sub-versions are just a few days apart. How the hell are end-users supposed to know when the kernel is ACTUALLY useable, if there are THIRTY SEVEN bug-fix releases?

The people that go to kernel.org to choose a kernel to download and compile hardly qualify for what most people will call a "user".

What Linus is calling "unexpected stability" is probably due to the distros intermediating between the kernel devs and the actual users. To put it another way, what's really happened is that the "stable" kernel is now being maintained by the likes of RedHat and Debian, while the "unstable" kernel is what you find at kernel.org.

We'll see how this plays out - but for the real world, this leaves Linus doing what he does best - develop and oversee cool developments - while the more rank-and-file organizations lead by the distros intermediate for the end users.

I've been using CentOS and Fedora Core, it's been at least 5 or 6 years since I felt the need to go to kernel.org!

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[tetromino (807969)]

Indeed. At this point, I have basically decided never to install a 2.6.x.y kernel until y >= 2. Losing data ain't worth it.

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[arose (644256)]

And that's why 2.6 is the way it is, most people just don't seem to want a stable as in "Debian stable" kernel, they want a "stable as in runs well, but gets new drivers and features" kernel.

bad website

[towsonu2003 (928663)]

can anyone post this "fragmented" and unaccessible interview video to youtube or google video as one or two big file(s)?

Some 2.7 ideas

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm a linux user, my company's products depend on it and I've contributed to it. I see a a couple of painful transitions coming though. I haven't seen the kernel quality go down, I'm not sure how people say "2.6 isn't stable" without specific issues they can point to. Overall the code keeps getting better. I say this as a warning, not as a doom and gloom kind of message.

VFS probably needs to be addressed. Reiserfs4 sort of exposed some of the issues. There are others though. To my knowledge ext2/3 are the only OSes that actually code strcitly against VFS and the other layers. XFS, JFS, Reiserfs, etc.. are all hacked in to it. If you follow the kernel list, you'll see nobody uses JFS and XFS seems to have regular crash reports. Upon using it myself (for 5 years) it has memory leaks, it routinely has trouble with new kernels. There have been regular performance regressions. Now, I don't really care about the filesystem itself that much but it seems fundamentally broken to me that a non-experimental filesystem has such routine problems. Either the API is uses is broken, the filesystem is broken or both. I'm becoming more inclined to think that it's VFS. This creates a circular sort of problem, you don't need VFS if ext2,3,4 are the only filesystems that are really supported, it's not nearly as important as it is treated. Either that or the process of having something included and non-experimental needs to include some kind of support aspect and maybe be rethought. So far as I can tell, IBM isn't really doing much more with JFS and nobody uses it, let's move to remove it (bummer too because it's a quite clean and elegant FS, much better than reiserfs or xfs in terms of code and design quality and cleanness.) There isn't a clean process for removing stuff from the kernel. Reiserfs is a prime example, Reiserfs3 isn't supported, time to move to remove it; it has known bugs and design flaws which are not being addressed. This particular area is more complex also because selinux depends on filesystem support, LVM behaves differently with different filesystems, different filesystems have different and variable tools support.. System filesystems need some work too, what's debugfs? configfs? How is sysfs different than configfs or procfs?

Filesystems are just an easy to see and expose portion of this problem there are other APIs which have the same issues. We retooled the build system a few years back, it's much better but there are major flaws still. There are drivers which cannot work unless loaded as a module and yet they can be linked in. There are a huge number that depend on other subsystems and you can easily misconfigure them (SATA depends on parts of SCSI. So I can static link some SATA modules in and dynamic link parts of the SCSI system in and the build system won't complain. Worse, if I break it just so, I can actually get it to build cleanly and freak out at runtime) I'm not advocating making it more difficult to hack on the kernel or add new modules to the build but it's fucked if it doens't catch that stuff. Worse, the driver is fucked if it can't be statically linked and if that's an acceptable limitation then it should be an option. (the Fusion series of RAID/SCSI/SAS type drivers is one that suffers from this problem) At the same time the build system is holy, good luck changing that without pissing off half the free world, and I don't even want to think about what would have to happen if it required a change to a .config file to take it to the next level. Part of the beauty of Linux in this regard is that it is remarkably simple to build and get involved with, there really aren't any tricks or anything to building it. This is something else where there needs to be a support component. There are good companies with well supported drivers and there are orphans. I'd rather have modules marked as supported or unsupported than whether or not they are GPL clean or tainted, I'd like to see that

Re:Is flash player 8 available for linux?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Flash 8 has been shown to destabilize the 2.6 kernel... Supposedly it will play nicely with the 2.7 kernel, though.

Re:

[Dadoo (899435)]

Works fine for me, and I'm using Flash 9 on an Athlon 64.

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[dtfinch (661405)]

Flash 9 for Linux has been available for at least a month or so, practically forever. Occasionally the sound stops and I have to restart Firefox, but that's the worst of my problems.

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[vladsinger (1049918)]

Flash Player 9 is avaliable for linux. I was going to gripe about it too, but there are at least two posts above which link to the download site.

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[smitty_one_each (243267)]

I installed, and even rebooted my laptop, for that Genuine Windows feel, and video still no worky-worky. Is this an elaborate prank?

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[smclean (521851)]

The main thing that sets the flash player apart from those other audio-producing applications you listed is that the flash player uses OSS. I'd assume you have software audio mixing, and my guess is that flash player doesn't know how to "play nice" with the software mixing solution you use, be it arts, alsa's dmix plugin (which new version of alsa enable by default for some cards), or esd.

Not that I'm a fan of Adobe's flash player. I still open a 32 bit browser whenever I absolutely need flash, and use

Re:

[flight_master (867426)]

It's Easy, I'm assuming you're using Firefox, so fire up Nano and open the file "/etc/firefox/firefoxrc" (as root)
Add this line: FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" (remove FIREFOX_DSP=)
Install the alsa-oss package.
Restart FF, and you are playing sound!

Re:9 sucks as bad as any other version

[10Ghz (453478)]

It's Easy, I'm assuming you're using Firefox, so fire up Nano and open the file "/etc/firefox/firefoxrc" (as root)
Add this line: FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" (remove FIREFOX_DSP=)
Install the alsa-oss package.
Restart FF, and you are playing sound!

Um, I'm not sure what planet you are living on, but that's not "easy". It's tedious and frustrating.

Re:

[just_another_sean (919159)]

I take it you've never had to fix anything with regedit either then?

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[cortana (588495)]

Frankly, in this area, "UNIX/POSIX" compatibility can go fuck itself. Does POSIX even specify audio output interfaces? Did "UNIX" (System V? BSD?) even ever have sound output?

ALSA is not only desired by high-end audio users. All users want basic features such as the ability for two programs to use the sound card at the same time. ALSA provides this (part of alsa-lib) and OSS does not.

ALSA is not necessarily Linux-specific. As far as application programs are concerned, ALSA is merely a stable program library

Re:

[10Ghz (453478)]

Changing one line in a text file, then typing "apt-get install alsa-oss" is at least as simple as operating a coffee machine.

I don't have to anything like that with any other OS I have used. I don't have to go around installing weird stuff and editing text-files just so I could get frigging sound working in a web-browser.

And yes, I use Linux (among other OS'es). Have been using it since 1999, and I'm a card-carrying member of a national LUG. But anyone who says that "It's easy, just edit this text file and install these apps and you are all set" is totally, 100% missing the point. Tasks like that are way beyond the capabilities

For anyone who can't watch the video

[canyon289 (848746)]

He's basically saying that no one is really developing a 2.7 kernel because 2.6 is extremely stable even with whatever experimentation they've done. He states that theres been times where they've gone over the 2 month release cycle because of the "big changes" they've done on the kernel. He states that unstable next to stable used to be a good model but it isn't good anymore. He states that if there was a 2.7 kernel they'd have to do all sorts of backporting to get whatever fixes on the 2.7 kernel to work on the 2.6 kernel.

Why backport?

[Colin Smith (2679)]

I thought the odd numbers were "run with it" kernels. Leave the even number kernels static for bugfixing only.

How about 2.9 then. Blue sky how would you design an OS for all the cheap commodity hardware around.

Re:Why backport?

[Zerathdune (912589)]

That scheme ended when 2.6 came out. The new system consists of 3 or 4 numbers formatted as:

a.b.c
or
a.b.c.d

a changes only when there is a massive restructuring of the kernel
b changes when there are large sweeping changes, but not of quite the same order as a. (linus, in the interview, says they'll do a 2.7 when and if they need to make changes large enough that they will be breaking everything.)
c changes when new features and/or drivers are added
d changes for small bug fixes and security patches. after a new c release the d number is ommitted when the c number has just changed.

Re:

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr. (142215)]

Very good.

I'd add an (e) (Oracle has 5 :)

Seriously (d) would be for bug fixes/security patches in general, e would be for ones that are expected to almost certainly not break anything.

e level upgrades: should be nearly 100% safe
d: should be safe, necessary fixes that could break things (e.g. fix a security hole but certain programs could have issues). NO API CHANGES or ADDITIONS!
c: new features. Usually safe, but not for mission critical servers. NO API drops/deprecations.
b: Major upgrade. System tools may

Re:

[harkabeeparolyn (711320)]

In other words, instead of doing things the right way, they are going to start taking shortcuts until things get bad again, and then, chastened, they'll go back to doing what they never should have stopped doing to begin with. Laziness, in other words.

Re:Video interviews

[mollymoo (202721)]

if someone could post a transcript of what was said, I'd be sure to read it

There's really no more to it than what's in the /. summary (for a change). Unless you really want to see Linus trying to remember how long the 2.6 kernel has been out and whether they ever had a 4 month gap between releases, you're not missing much.