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Linus on All Sorts of Stuff 339

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-a-little-dance dept.
Linux Times.Net writes " Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre. "
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Linus on All Sorts of Stuff More

Linus on All Sorts of Stuff

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  • Hurd (Score:5, Interesting)

    by abrink ( 153323 ) * <abrinkNO@SPAMbrink.cx> on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:26PM (#10624433) Homepage
    Does anyone here even use Hurd? How do you like it?

    • Re:Hurd (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I prefere Flock myself

    • Re:Hurd (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chundra ( 189402 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:34PM (#10624571)
      From the hurd page:

      "The Hurd, together with the GNU Mach microkernel, the GNU C Library and the other GNU and non-GNU programs in the GNU system, provide a rather complete and usable operating system today. It is not ready for production use, as there are still many bugs and missing features. However, it should be a good base for further development and non-critical application usage.


      The GNU system (also called GNU/Hurd) is completely self-contained (you can compile all parts of it using GNU itself). You can run several instances of the Hurd in parallel, and debug even critical servers in one Hurd instance with gdb running on another Hurd instance. You can run the X window system, applications that use it, and advanced server applications like the Apache webserver.

      On the negative side, the support for character devices (like sound cards) and other hardware is mostly missing. Although the POSIX interface is provided, some additional interfaces like POSIX shared memory or semaphores are still under development."


      I.e. it might be fun to play with, but it's not very useful for the average Joe.

      • Re:Hurd (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ComaVN ( 325750 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:42PM (#10624677)
        From that description, it doesn't seem very useful for exceptional Joe either, only for GNU/Joes developing Hurd.

        • Re:Hurd (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Chundra ( 189402 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:51PM (#10624784)
          It's not entirely bad for operating systems students to get their hands dirty with either. It does have some cool things going for it--though it does seem doubtful they'll ever get anywhere with it as a mainstream OS--for example: rather than using the traditional monolithic kernel, hurd uses a multi-server running on top of microkernel approach. So it is definitely neat and interesting for os geeks to play with.

        • Re:Hurd (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Planesdragon ( 210349 )
          From that description, it doesn't seem very useful for exceptional Joe either, only for GNU/Joes developing Hurd.

          Or running servers. Web servers, print servers, file servers... heck, it might even work for supercomputers for all I know.

        • Which would put it on a par with how useful the Linux kernel was when it was young. It wasn't useful unless one was extremely technical, and even then it lacked a lot of hardware support and one couldn't do a lot of commonly useful things with it. In time, the HURD can mature and become competitive. This doesn't mean GNU/Linux is a piece of cake for jobs people want to do.

          But what I find interesting is Torvalds' answer to the question following his HURD answer:

          Preston: When do you think Linux will take over desktop market from Microsoft?

          Linus Torvalds: Oh, I think it's started already, it's just slow. You don't realize just _how_ slow it is, unless you've been looking at Linux over the last ten years. People kind of expect it to suddenly be "good enough" and take off like a rocket, but that's not how these things work. It gets better very gradually, and people get used to it very gradually. So I look back ten years, and think about how Linux was back then, and I have to chuckle a bit. The desktop of today is a bit better than it was a year ago, but you don't _really_ see the differences unless you step back a lot more..

          Here, unlike in previous questions, I think Torvalds uses the word "Linux" to mean a complete operating system in which the Linux kernel is being used (typically, a GNU/Linux system), so I'll interpret the answer in that vein.

          The main point I wanted to draw out is that it took ten years, by Torvalds' estimate, to get where things are now. I'd argue that that estimate is wrong by half (the free software community began 20 years ago), but even if we take the ten year figure at face value, the HURD hasn't been running on anyone's machine for ten years yet. And even now there are people (such as a fellow I had on my radio show last week who was addressing a caller saying the same thing) saying that the modern GNU/Linux system is too hard to use, too complex to install and to complex to do some jobs with when compared against Microsoft Windows or MacOS X. Those jobs include:

          • formatting an additional HD and adding it to one's system
          • configuring a FAX modem
          • doing optical code reading (OCR)
          • burning CDs and DVDs on some distributions (like Fedora Core)
          • sharing printers or disks via Samba

          All of these jobs are possible but way more difficult to simply do than they ought to be. And few (if any) distributions make it easy to do these things by including the free software packages available to make them work right out of the box.

          Configuration is too hard; getting these things working rely on one's skill with a command line interface or editing technical configuration files. ESR's printer essay was right on the mark when it came to his perspective on hooking up a printer--adding a printer should be automatic and the system should do more network scanning and autoconfiguration to suit what most people most of the time will want.

          So, even for those who would complain the GNU/HURD system is too far out of reach, I'd say look closer to home and see the problems that exist for GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is a heck of a lot closer to what I think people yearn for, but that's no reason to trash GNU/HURD.

          • burning CDs and DVDs on some distributions (like Fedora Core)

            Is it hard to do that on Red Hat? I haven't used Red Hat recently, but I'm just curious. (Though I personally use Debian) I used mandrake not long ago and it was literally as easy as installing it then running k3b which is as easy to use as Nero - in fact I'd give the crown to Mandrake over WinXP in that respect. In fact all of those things except OCR (which I've never heard of) and modems (which I have no experience of in mandrake) are a br
            • Is it hard to do that on Red Hat?

              No, you can install k3b on redhat fedora core and burn away, but knowing that k3b is as easy to use as Nero, or even EXISTS is harder on Linux than Windows if for no other reason than the fact that you can't just go to the store and see all the cd burning software available, and buy what you need. Most CD burners come with some kind of burning software for Windows, but not for Linux. If I was a "user" with a new CD burner in my machine that runs Linux, being able to bu
            • I appreciate the software freedom GNU/Linux and other free software grant me; this is the main reason I stick with GNU/Linux and why I advocate its use elsewhere. But there is a lot of room for improvement. I look back over the past 20 years and see all the progress that has been made, so I'm not raising these issues as an alarm. These things can and will be improved. It's about whittling down how they should work and making them work that way (and ignoring the technocrats who want to overburden the sit
      • Does it say if it still has a 2 GB limit for partition sizes?

        • Re:Hurd (Score:4, Informative)

          by Chundra ( 189402 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:17PM (#10625113)
          Last time I played with it, yes, the 2GB limit was still there.

          Wheee, let's map our whole filesystem into virtual memory. ;)

          Then again, it's not that bad. Definitely not ready for production use, but not unusable either. Apparently the limitation is slated to be removed sometime. For comparison, have you seen the recommended partition sizes for OpenBSD?

        • Re:Hurd (Score:2, Informative)

          by Curtman ( 556920 )
          Does it say if it still has a 2 GB limit for partition sizes

          It appears so [gnu.org].

          • Re:Hurd (Score:5, Interesting)

            by ComaVN ( 325750 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @05:52PM (#10626160)
            Damn, that faq page [gnu.org] is the funniest thing I've seen all day.

            Some quotes:

            The Hurd throws this historical garbage away. We think that we have found a more flexible solution called shadow filesystems. Unfortunately, support for shadowed filesystems is not yet implemented.

            Eh? throw the (working) garbage away before the new solution is implemented?

            You are using IRQ sharing; GNU Mach does not support this in the least.

            Yeah, because that's such an uncommon thing for hardware to use.

            GNU Mach does not support loadable kernel modules. Therefore, you will have to compile a new kernel and only activate those device drivers that you actually need.

            So much for a microkernel then.

            The Hurd will just as happily swap to any other raw disk space and overwrite anything it finds. So, be careful!

            Thanks for the warning. That will make me want to install it on my machine.

            This FAQ document was probably secretly written by Linus Torvalds to ridicule it, and promote his own views on software development.

            • Re:Hurd (Score:5, Informative)

              by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @07:31PM (#10626980)
              Thanks for the warning. That will make me want to install it on my machine.

              In contrast to Windows which will overwrite your bootloader, reorder partitions, and change partition types of existing partitions without you asking it to.. I don't think its fair to ridicule Hurd for warning you that it is possible to destroy data if you go out of your way to initialize a non-swap partition as a swap partition.

              You can run mkswap in Linux on any partition regardless of weather it is set to "Linux swap" type or not. Somehow that hasn't been a huge problem for me either.

              • Re:Hurd (Score:3, Informative)

                by boots@work ( 17305 )
                You can run mkswap in Linux on any partition regardless of weather it is set to "Linux swap" type or not.

                Yes, but Linux will only swap onto partitions that have been prepared with mkswap, which makes it somewhat less likely you'll clobber a partition you meant to keep. That's really the only point of mkswap; everything else could be done perfectly well in the kernel.

      • Re:Hurd (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bsd4me ( 759597 )

        I.e. it might be fun to play with, but it's not very useful for the average Joe.

        Well, Linux started out as something barely usable even to hardcore geeks (kermit was the most complex application for a good while), and look what it turned into.

        • Re:Hurd (Score:3, Informative)

          by ignorant_newbie ( 104175 )
          > Well, Linux started out as something
          > barely usable

          Yes, but the Hurd has had a lot longer to stop sucking than Linux has, as it was already in progress before Linus got started.

          One can argue that this is because all the developers flocked around Linus ( I think Stallman has made this argument from time to time ) but given that world+dog has given up on the whole microkernel thing, it's more likely that the hurd just sucks.

    • Re:Hurd (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:50PM (#10624771)
      A few months ago the debian popularity contest reported two users [debian.org], but now they are back to zero :)

    • Re:Hurd (Score:5, Interesting)

      by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:12PM (#10625060)
      There was a time when I thought Ogg Vorbis held the title of "worst name ever". Then I read about the Hurd's name [gnu.org].

      • Flumotion? (Score:3, Funny)

        by stor ( 146442 )
        Well you'll be happy to hear that Fluendo [fluendo.com] have just released their new streaming server "Flumotion" that streams ogg vorbis.

        *achoo!*

        Cheers
        Stor

    • My opinion (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Its great. I'm only running it because its the first platform that Duke Nukem Forever will run on.

  • About to be /.'ed (Score:5, Informative)

    by GuyZero ( 303599 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:26PM (#10624445)
    This is moments from being /.'ed to death...

    Article text

    Linus Torvalds: ''Desktop Market has already started''
    Preston St. Pierre of Linux Times interviews Linus Torvalds.

    Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre.

    Preston: Your life has been dedicated for quite some time to the Linux kernel. If this project was no longer yours, what kind of project would you most like to take on next (games, user applications, another kernel, development tools, etc)?

    Linus Torvalds: I like being close to the hardware, and doing good visuals (ie games or GUI's) is not my forte, so I'd probably work on development tools or similar.

    In fact, the only project I've actually spent some time on in the last year (apart from the kernel, of course) has been this source checker application that does some extended type-checking for the kernel. So very much a development tool.

    Preston: What is your favorite interpreted programming language, and why?

    Linus Torvalds: Heh. I don't much do interpreters. The only one I end up using consciously (ie not part of somebody else's scripts) end up being just the regular shell. It's not that I dislike things like perl/python, it's just that I tend to either just write C, or do _so_ simple things that shell works fine for me.

    I might admit to having a soft spot for basic, but I haven't actually used it in closer to twenty years or so. But it was what I started with, so it will always be special ;)

    Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?

    Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

    So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.

    And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.

    In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.

    Preston: From a user's prospective, what improvements do you see the Linux kernel offering over Hurd? Do you think Hurd might eventually become as popular as Linux?

    Linus Torvalds: I think Hurd is dead. See above on why. It has a "big vision", and people forgot about the details, and forgot about admitting when they went wrong. So the project stumbled, and _still_ didn't bother to look down on the ground. But hey, I might be wrong. I haven't actually followed Hurd in any detail, and maybe the project is more down-to-earth now, and more concerned about getting things working, and less about "design". And less

  • GNU/HURD (Score:5, Funny)

    by atomic-penguin ( 100835 ) <wolfe21@marshall. e d u> on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:26PM (#10624447) Homepage Journal
    Shadowy outcome for HURD, who could have seen that one coming?

    • Re:GNU/HURD (Score:5, Funny)

      by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) * <.mark. .at. .seventhcycle.net.> on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:38PM (#10624621) Homepage
      Umm, Netcraft? They're good at predicting these things ;)
    • The fact the the acronym sounds like NERD should have been the first clue...

    • Re:GNU/HURD (Score:5, Funny)

      by plj ( 673710 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:17PM (#10625119)
      Damn me for being a naive fool. I always believed what Linus said and kept waiting. And behold: now he's denying it. Do you think I should change my sig now?

  • Large software projects... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Power Everywhere ( 778645 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:27PM (#10624459) Homepage
    Linus takes on approach, the BSDs take another. I think there's a place for both in thr world, and that the BSD's is the approach for saner, safer integration of technology. Linux, which takes a faster approach, is where the actual technology comes from but oftentimes in an untested manner.

  • Who is - (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by thewldisntenuff ( 778302 )
    Linux Times.net? I looked over their site, and most of it seems to be some /. stories and stuff about a few different topics.....I'm not trying to knock them, but I've never heard of them. Are they new 'round these parts?

    -thewldisntenuff

  • Non-profit (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fembots ( 753724 )
    When you're not into making profit out of something, you're usually more generous to include alternatives (or even competition).

  • the HURD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MyHair ( 589485 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:33PM (#10624542) Journal
    Interesting point on the HURD. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but I discovered and used Linux in 1994 when I wanted a cheap or free way to learn Unix. I've followed the HURD off an on for the past couple of years because I think it's a neat idea with potential, but it has no immediate use to me besides geek appeal, and there are many other things with better utility and geek appeal to me.

    (I still hope the HURD will be something someday.)

  • I've always liked Linus... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bourne_id ( 812415 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:35PM (#10624583)

    He's not a god or anything, but a very down-to-earth person when it comes to software and the linux kernal in general. He is absolutely correct on what happens to "big vision" software. Too many projects that started big have fizzled, and small applications that work tend to grow and morph into ground-shaking applications as they mature. Take web-browsers for example.

    JMD

    • You can add video games to this list as well....

    • Re:I've always liked Linus... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Krafty Koder ( 697396 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:18PM (#10625133)
      "Take web-browsers for example"

      Or PHP for example - originally short for "personal home page" , it was a series of perl scripts for tracking who was looking at Ramus Lerdorf's online c.v.

      Now its somehow morphed into something that runs millions of websites worldwide. If thats not a good example of Linus's "think small" philosophy, i dont know what is.

    • Re:I've always liked Linus... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Yaztromo ( 655250 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:19PM (#10625140) Homepage Journal
      Too many projects that started big have fizzled, and small applications that work tend to grow and morph into ground-shaking applications as they mature.

      A quick search of the web -- or heck, just SourceForge [sf.net] -- will show a plethora of projects that "started small" which have also completely fizzled.

      There is nothing wrong with thinking big when starting a project - there are some types of project that simply can't be done on a small scale. Mozilla is pretty damned big, for example, and while it started off with Netscape source code, much of it was discarded. Eclipse is likewise a big project.

      The key to doing a big project is you have to really put your nose to the grindstone and work your butt off to get something online in a reasonable timeframe. The biggest problem I see with large scale projects that fail is they get bogged down in minutae, which slows down their release cycles so much that they don't achieve any developer or user attention. We all forget with Firefox 1.0 imminent how the press used to claim that the Mozilla project has failed a few years back because it had taken them a few years from the time Netscape Open Sourced their browser code, to the point where it was usuable. And yet now we're celebrating the release of a world-class Open Source browser.

      That's a big project which didn't start off small which is going to be a rousing success. Yes, projects which fail to gain traction because of lofty ideas and infrequent releases to tend to fail in the long run. However, there are an order of magnitude more small projects which similarily fail. The only difference between the two is we tend to hear about the "big" ones, but nobody cares one whit about the tens of thousands of small projects which come and go.

      Yaz.

    • He is absolutely correct on what happens to "big vision" software. Too many projects that started big have fizzled, and small applications that work tend to grow and morph into ground-shaking applications as they mature.

      I think it depends on what angle you look at it from. Looking at this from the commerical development side (worked on by many people in one location, not necessarily proprietary), as opposed to the open source (many people, many locations) distributed development side, I've done far too ma

  • Linus on what stuff? (Score:4, Funny)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:37PM (#10624607)
    The article doesnt even mention the devices that run Linus... what a let-down.

    I, for one, would have welcome our new Linus-run overlord stuff.
    ^_^

  • What a terrible "interview" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by soboroff ( 91667 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:38PM (#10624620)
    What's with all these so-called interviews which are basically a handful of random questions asked by an interviewer who seems to be doing his junior-high homework assignment? OSNews is bad enough... can't they ask anything interesting, or actually engage in a conversation about the subject? Linus has lots of interesting things to say, but unfortunately these folks can't think of what to ask.

    The interviews in ACM Queue [acmqueue.org], particular the one with Jim Gray interviewed by David Patterson, was much much more intriguing.

  • hmm.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:41PM (#10624667)
    "Preston: What's the latest happening in the kernel development?

    Linus Torvalds: Oh, it's been more of the same. Worrying about drivers, fixing interfaces to make it harder to write bugs by mistake, and just keeping up with new hardware and new ideas. The kernel is definitely maturing in the sense that a lot of the exciting really _new_ things are all in user space, and the kernel is sometimes called upon to make them easier to work with..."

    Let's stay at the word "maturing". I'm more interested in opinions from.. mature programmers. Is there a point that when it's reached - in the case of the linux kernel in about say.. 10 years - then software is only touched for fixing minor bugs? Or is the hardware/marketing/rest software world changing in a way that something can never ever be called mature but only 'for the time being'?

    -someone

    • Re:hmm.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )
      Well, given the trend over the last 20 years (or more, really), things have been in a fairly constant state of maturing. Hardware has changed, as has the needs of the hardware and the desired results. Granted, I can't think of anything in the last 5 or so years that has changed in much at all besides bigger, faster, and smaller, so maybe there's a chance for the current operating systems to reach a point of 'maturity'. At least some of them - it's pretty much a given that certain large software companies wi

  • "Infrastructure" (Score:5, Funny)

    by HRbnjR ( 12398 ) <chris@hubick.com> on Monday October 25, 2004 @03:45PM (#10624705) Homepage
    I work from home, and OSDL provides some infrastructure that allows me to get my work done without having to worry about things.


    Heh, "provides some infrastructure" ??

    Such a sweet deal would normally make one wonder...


    Richard Chesler : Get the f**k out of here, you're fired!

    Narrator : I have a better solution. You keep me on the payroll as an outside consultant, and in exchange for my salary, my job will be never to tell people these things that I know. I don't even have to come into the office, I can do this job from home.

  • Insigtful (Score:2, Insightful)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )
    Those were some insightful comments from Mr. Torvalds. Interesting that they are such simple words, the things they express so obvious and down to earth, but since they come from a public figure, they have a lot of authority.

    Of course, there are other [microsoft.com] public [georgewbush.com] figures [welovethei...nister.com] whose statements make a lot less sense; being deceptive rather than insigtful.

  • Words of Wisdom (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jasoncc ( 754385 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:00PM (#10624885)
    Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.
    These are truly words of wisdom! Take note, young software engineer!

    • Re:Words of Wisdom (Score:4, Insightful)

      by _bug_ ( 112702 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:34PM (#10625301) Journal
      These are truly words of wisdom! Take note, young software engineer!

      I don't buy it. And perhaps it's because I fall into the young category and might be lacking the "real world" experience.

      e're taught from day 1 to look at code reuse and to break large chunks of logic into smaller bits. That requires a bit of planning ahead. You need to make some good guesses about where things will go. Right now you don't need to worry about transferring data via sockets, but there's a good chance one day you will need to. So you design the way your program breaks down its funcionality so that it's a trivial matter to take the output from one function and direct it torwards another that begins/handles the transfer process.

      Lets take it up a notch in complexity and look at planning the development for a 3D game. You build a modular system so as things change, you can move to a different sound engine, or 3D engine, or whatever, and don't have to rewrite half the code of the system. But to build modular, you have to plan, you have to see where, down the road, that modularity is going to give you a benefit.

      That's what makes the HURD really nice is all the modularity is planned and laid out. There's a structure and you know the direction the development will take. Big picture stuff.

      There's a reason the captian of the ship pilots from the bridge, where he can see what's in front of him. Linus seems to want to pilot his ship from the engine room.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @05:17PM (#10625819)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Words of Wisdom (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Tony-A ( 29931 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @08:06PM (#10627309)
        I don't buy it. And perhaps it's because I fall into the young category and might be lacking the "real world" experience.

        Not so much young as that what you can see and think scales linearly while the hidden complexities tend to scale exponentially.
        The devil is in the details and as noted elsewhere "The biggest problem I see with large scale projects that fail is they get bogged down in minutae." It's not just the complexity of the final product, you have to deal with all the complexities all along the path toward creating that final product and most important choosing which path at each fork in the road.

        There's a reason the captian of the ship pilots from the bridge, where he can see what's in front of him. Linus seems to want to pilot his ship from the engine room.

        Sounds good until you get grounded on a submerged reef.
        It's even more fun in uncharted waters.

        Wisecrack from a master sculptor. "I just removed the parts that weren't David."
        At a particular level that is exactly what happens. Linus is right when he says "And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway."

      • Re:Words of Wisdom (Score:3, Interesting)

        by umoto ( 19193 )
        I agree with the spirit of what you're saying. Reuse is progress. However, except when the reusable bits are obvious, it is cumbersome and risky to try to write code for a specific project and simultaneously make it reusable for other projects. Premature generalization is a subtle enemy.

        The 3D engine is a great example. Let's say you're a game company creating two 3D games at once. One game is a board game with a few 3D animations, the other is an immersive 3D experience. Do you develop an engine cap

  • FSF doesn't rush anything, so chill. :) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DataDragon ( 693231 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:02PM (#10624901)

    Okay, maybe HURD isn't where we all want it, that is -- on our desktops and running everything... BUT...

    Lets not forget, HURD is FSF/GNU, and they've proven time and time again that they are presistant, don't rush to complete their vision, and go the extra distance on a lot of things.

    If HURD achieves both the standards and the quality of forethought that all the other FSF/GNU code that has been released so far, then it will doubtlessly be a marvel of OS technology. It has a tall order to fill, though, and honestly -- it there's no rush to see it pushed into production, then I'd let the politics play themselves out. However, it *is* the goal of the FSF. How it finally winds up-- well-- I'm anticipating to see like everyone else, but I've become a believer in the FSF's patience, skills, and collective vision.

    • hey, no rush (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bobalu ( 1921 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:10PM (#10625018)
      It's only been what, like 15 years?

      Who's kidding who?

    • It's been TWENTY YEARS since they started working on a GNU kernel. As even RMS admits, they picked the wrong design for a kernel, but as he won't admit, they're too stubborn to change it.

  • Anyone else hate... (Score:4, Funny)

    by palndron ( 37455 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:11PM (#10625036) Homepage
    Articles that take more time to load than to read?

  • the kernel is so far from mature, sigh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:12PM (#10625056)
    The kernel is mature he thinks. Everyone he works with agrees with him. Such a failure of imagination....

    I think this is the difference between researcher/architect types and coders.

    To a researcher, there is so much that needs to be done to enhance the kernel that
    the problem is picking one thing to focus on.

    To coders, ok, Linux now does everything that Unix did 5 years ago, what more can be done?

    The coders were needed back when there was no free version of Unix. Now that there is one, some of these old guys (30 something and managing to be over the hill, CS is a great field....) need to step aside and let the researchers take the lead.

    The sad thing is that of course they won't. They'll just keep right on copying plan 9 and everything else 5 years old, and probably do well in the market, sigh.

    The problem with HURD is that their fundamental design is performance ineffective. Having a grand vision is not the problem, having a mistaken vision is.

    It would be nice if BSD came back to life.... that was researcher driven, and they did a lot to advance the state of the art.

    He is a nice guy though.
    • "The coders were needed back when there was no free version of Unix. Now that there is one, some of these old guys (30 something and managing to be over the hill, CS is a great field....) need to step aside and let the researchers take the lead."


      So, what are you/the researchers waiting for? Fork it already and get busy. Linus ain't stupid, he'll put your patches/port your changes in if they are good.

      Heck, do a good enough job and you could start the 2.7.x series.

    • Re:the kernel is so far from mature, sigh (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Troy Baer ( 1395 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @07:05PM (#10626732) Homepage
      The kernel is mature he thinks. Everyone he works with agrees with him. Such a failure of imagination....

      I think this is the difference between researcher/architect types and coders.

      To a researcher, there is so much that needs to be done to enhance the kernel that the problem is picking one thing to focus on.

      Oh, horsehockey. I work with a bunch of computer science researchers who work on high performance computing topics. Guess how most of 'em do their OS-level research? They take Linux and make their wacky new file system/interconnect/etc. ideas work with it. Seems to work pretty well for them.

      Another thing to remember is that a lot of CS researchers write half-arsed code that isn't ready for prime-time. They're usually thinking proof-of-concept, not production deployment. That isn't unique to academia, either; it amazes me how much utter crap escapes from big corporate research labs claiming to be a "product".

      [/me decides to quit before this degenerates into YA rant about the fact that physicists are often better at production-quality software engineering than computer scientists]

      --Troy

  • Linus's just this guy, you know... (Score:4, Funny)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:22PM (#10625177)
    Gag Halfrunt...

  • The HURD problem (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:23PM (#10625183) Homepage
    I've been really disappointed with the HURD guys.

    Microkernel architecture is really hard to get right. If you get it right, microkernels are fast and stable, like VM for IBM mainframes and QNX. Both have long, long uptimes, run important systems, and are modified very seldom.

    But most architects don't get it right. If you get it wrong, like Mach, no amount of patching will fix it. Because open source development has a "patch" mentality, it's almost impossible to fix fundamental architectural problems in an open source project.

    The HURD people finally dumped Mach and went to L4, which is a half-finished academic microkernel. That's not working either.

    I'd like to see a high-security microkernel OS in widespread use, but the HURD guys aren't going to deliver it. And we really need one.

    • Re:The HURD problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @05:28PM (#10625944)
      I'd like to see a high-security microkernel OS in widespread use, but the HURD guys aren't going to deliver it. And we really need one.
      Why do we really need one?

      • Re:The HURD problem (Score:5, Interesting)

        by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @10:00PM (#10628029) Journal
        Why do we really need one?

        Far more reliable, and secure.

        Even a "kernel" bug isn't a root exploit. You can have highly secure systems by just finely tuning the level of privlidge you want to give a process. Even if there's an exploit, you can't break-in. Basically, nothing runs as "root". Think ultra-finely-tuned jails, automatically, for everything.

        Even the most low-level drivers malfunctioning doesn't cause a crash or a reboot. If any of your drivers has a problem, crashes, corrupts memory, etc, it's contained to just that driver, and it will be stopped, and restarted, without your even knowing about it.

        A microkernel can really wipe the floor with a monolitic kernel. QNX really makes Linux look fragile. For a better example, look at OpenVMS. Even after all these years, it's still got an unbelievable reputation.

        You know why even computer experts wouldn't trust their lives to computer-controlled systems? Because they've never used a microkernel-based system.

        No monolitic version of Linux/BSD is ever going to be able to replace a microkernel-based system.

      • Re:The HURD problem (Score:3, Informative)

        by Animats ( 122034 )
        No. Read the next line:

        However, in Mac OS X, Mach is linked with other kernel components into a single kernel address space. This is primarily for performance; it is much faster to make a direct call between linked components than it is to send messages or do remote procedure calls (RPC) between separate tasks.

        It had to be done that way because the IPC system Mach bolted onto a BSD kernel is slow. Retrofitting message passing onto a kernel that wasn't designed for it seems to consistently result in a

    • Examples for systems using Mach are MacOSX and IBMs AIX....
      Mach used to be bad around 1990 but the things have been patched up ;-)

  • Linus on All Sorts of Stuff (Score:3, Funny)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:35PM (#10625312) Homepage Journal
    Linus on All Sorts of Stuff - what a useless article. They don't even ask where he gets his stuff, what stuff he likes most, how he mixes his stuff. What a waste of perfectly good white html space.

  • Hmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMspamgoeshere.calum.org> on Monday October 25, 2004 @04:46PM (#10625446) Homepage
    There are currently, 4221 guest(s) and 0 member(s) that are online.

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