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Interview With Kernel Hacker Dave Jones 130

Posted by Hemos from the learning-the-innards dept.
A reader writes "Kerneltrap has recently interviewed Dave Jones who currently lives in London, employed by SuSE as a Linux kernel hacker. In the past six months since he graduated from the University of Glamorgan he has gotten involved in an impressive range of kernel related projects, including Powertweak, x86info, OProfile and the Kernel Janitors Project. Additionally, he maintains a -dj patch for the 2.5 development kernel, helping to sync it with the stable 2.4 kernel as well as offering increased stability. "
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Interview With Kernel Hacker Dave Jones More

Interview With Kernel Hacker Dave Jones

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  • Arrrh! (Score:4, Funny)

    by nexex ( 256614 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @01:27PM (#2755201) Homepage
    Now we finally know what is in Davey Jones' locker! The most feared kernel hacker on the seven seas!

  • Athlon... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daitengu ( 172781 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @01:30PM (#2755211) Homepage Journal
    Now you see the difference between Intel and AMD .. I really haven't seen Intel thanked by any of the Kernel hackers/developers the way AMD is constantly thanked for being so helpful. Just goes to show you what the better processor really is.

    • Re:Athlon... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, it just shows you who responds more to the open source crowd. "Open source" != "better". Intel has no reason to pander to some free software company. By virtue of being better, they get more money from companies with money to spend.
    • the p3....

      just from personal experience, the p3 is a better/faster/more responsive desktop chip. I realize it's about 50% more expensive than a comprable athalon, but a 933mhz p3 on an i815 smokes my 1.1ghz tbird wit a gf2-mx400. Both 100mhz fsb (yeah, tbird is ddr, so it's 2x100). Not a hard drive issue either.
      • But intel destroyed any notion of being a good chip manufacturer when it artificially inflated the clock speed of the P4 by sacrificing performance. Now even a 1.56 ghz athlon xp can smoke the fastest p4 (2.0 ghz) in most situations.
      • Your smoking crack and there are plenty 'o bipartisan benchmark tests that prove it. Just do a google search. As far as smoking the athlon->nothing smokes better than the athlon: MY room doesn't need no stinking heaters...
        • I've come to the belief that there's a difference between benchmarks and real world use. Mostly after my experiences with the athalon & the p3.
      • In my experience I've found the Athlons faster than the Pentiums. My Athlon 1.2GHz smoked a P4 1.4GHz in benchmarks - heh :)
        • Which benchmark - the one where the HSF falls off?
          • Are you really so misinformed that you believe a 1.4GHz Pentium 4 can outperform a 1.1GHz Athlon Thunderbird in more than a handful of applications? (all of which are special purpose and highly P4 optimized)
            If you compare the design decisions made, all but the least geeky of us can see that the P4 is designed for clockspeed (for marketing--the average joe equates clockspeed linearly with performance) whereas the Athlon was designed for real-world performance.

            If the only material you have is "what if the heatsink falls off.", that's fairly pathetic. Most Athlon motherboards have mounting holes around the CPU. If you mount the heatsink to those, you'd have to rip a chunk of the motherboard off in order for the heatsink to come loose--and even then it would still be attached to the CPU! (Just that the CPU portion of the motherboard would have been liberated)

            Charles Burns
        • My United Devices disributed agent (kinda like SETI@home for cancer research) rates the P4 1.5 GHz as 100%, and my Athlon XP at 1400 MHz as 133% :D

      • Re:Athlon... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Sivar ( 316343 )
        That doesn't sound very likely. The only significant architectural advantages that the P3 has over the T-bird are SSE and a much wider L2 cache (256 bit VS the Athlon's 64-bit)
        In the majority of real-world applications, a T-bird will be within 5% of the speed of the P3. Sometimes 5% faster, sometimes 5% slower, or somewhere in-between (depends onthe application).
        If you have an Athlon system (which has a clockspeed advantage, no less) that "seems" slower, it is likely either a hardware problem, as in some other component of the system is holding it back, or you suffer from the 'feel good' feeling that some people have with an Intel chip VS. anyone else.
        Not that the P3 isn't a good chip--far from it. It is amazing that it can compete with the Athlon (other than in clockspeed) with a core that was designed almost 7 years ago. It is a tribute to Intel's engineering prowess.
        If only the P4 was a tribute to anything but consumer ignorance.
        "P4 is 2GHz. Ath-a-lon is 1.6GHz. 2 is bigger than 1.6, therefore P4 is faster."
        By that logic, every CPU on earth has the same performance, so it doesn't matter other than how high you can get he clockspeed. I guess a 1GHz IBM Power4 is slower than a 1.3GHz Pentium-4. (or not...)

        That said, if your Athlon system has a 100MHz FSB, something is wrong. The only chipset that defaults to such as speed is the prehistoric AMD750, which doesn't work with T-birds anyway. It is also not a DDR chipset. Come to think of it, the i815 (which is a great chipset) supports a 133MHz FSB as well. Was that a typo?

        Charles Burns
        • It's a via (amd) board...maybe it is the chipset.

          the core frequency of the athalon is measured as a mutliple of 100, the fsb is 2x that. So the fsb is 200. It's a kt133a.

          yeah...you're also right about the p3, 933 divides roughly evenly by 133...

          Where does the feel good effect of intel chipsets come from? Are via chipsets that crappy? What alternative is there for a good amd chipset? none of the in-house amd chipsets are actually production read yas far as I understand, they were jsut reference designs.
          • "Where does the feel good effect of intel chipsets come from? Are via chipsets that crappy?"

            You have to realize that for a while Intel had such a huge majority of the cpu/chipset market that many hardware venders tested almost exclusivly with Intel stuff, at least until after they got the product out the door. Also When the KT133 came out Intel was still using the aging BX chipset and all the required drivers (for the BX) were already built into Win98. The KT133 however was newer than Win98 so those users had to install extra drivers to get things working properly.

            While I think that the reliability of the KT133 chipset is probably debatable, the performance was never bad enough to explain a 1.1GHz Athlon being outperformed by a 933MHz P3. Something else must be up with your setup.

            " What alternative is there for a good amd chipset? "

            The SiS 730S and 735S chipsets seem to perform well and have very few problems however AFIK they are only currently being used on PCChips motherboards which many people (for good reason) won't touch. Personally I've been very happy with the 730 & 735 based systems I've built.
        • "That said, if your Athlon system has a 100MHz FSB, something is wrong. The only chipset that defaults to such as speed is the prehistoric AMD750 "

          That's not true, quite a few Athlon motherboards default to 100/200MHz fsb. It's pretty common to have to change a jumper or bios setting to enable 133/266 fsb operation. Remember that some Athlons (even some Tbirds) and all Durons come in 100/200 fsb versions.
      • And what tests are you using? EVERY test I've ever seen has had the Athlon WASTING the Pentium III .. in everything... at all speeds.
        • no benchmarks...day to day desktop usage...
          • you've got some other sort of hardware issues, unless your PIII is some sort of mutant..... I love how people always say "Oh, my computer is slow, I must need a new processor" .. or "My processor sucks" as the hard drive sits at 80% fragmented....
    • I really haven't seen Intel thanked by any of the Kernel hackers/developers the way AMD is constantly thanked for being so helpful. Just goes to show you what the better processor really is.

      I wasn't aware the industry had switched to a "how nicely they responded to email" benchmark for processors.

      Unless you think the Intel processors automatically change the contents of emails or delete them or something, I don't see the technical link between "bunch of dicks" and "products don't work".

      I'm not taking a stand here on which processor is better, but you are making an assertion that a point of corporate culture is proof of a qualitative technical opinion, and I believe the term the industry uses for that is "bullshit".
  • that Dave will be collaborating with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed on his upcoming kernel patches?

  • Dave Jones (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jodrell ( 191685 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @01:59PM (#2755292) Homepage
    Since there hasn't been a proper post yet, just my two pence: Dave's a nice bloke. We've been out drinking a few times and he's a laugh. Also very scary, but that's a fact of life if 1) you're welsh and 2) you hack the kernel for fun and profit.

  • Dave *is* Ming The Merciless (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joel Rowbottom ( 89350 ) on Thursday December 27, 2001 @02:43PM (#2755407) Homepage
    OK, let's compare the two here. Dave [jml.net] compared with Ming the Merciless [freeserve.co.uk] (of Flash Gordon fame).

    Now, is that a separated-at-birth thing or what?

    But at least he's grown the beard back. Most certainly required for Alan Cox-style shenanigans.

  • I'm impressed, and amazed! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Thursday December 27, 2001 @02:53PM (#2755446) Homepage Journal
    The University of Glamorgan (formerly the Polytechnic of Wales) is probably the least-clued University in the country, when it comes to technology. I can remember introducing the wonders of Gopher, Archie and Netrek to the PoW, when I was a student there. Gopher got banned, as it took control away from the system admins, and also weakened their argument that students shouldn't be allowed Internet access, as they'd clog the network up.


    Porting the VAX Netrek clients to the DEC stations was, ummm, fun. :) The VAX at the University at the time was slow, horribly unstable, and totally unsuited to heavy-duty interactive network gaming. But, hey! Hardly anyone used the DEC stations, apart from some engineering types who needed to use the PHIGS graphics language. Not getting caught was a bit tougher, but I managed to get a Netrek group running for almost a month, before anyone caught on.


    Then, of course, there was The Curse Of PoWCON! It's a conferencing program, based on DEC Notes. The database would blow up, every time a conference exceeded 2,000 notes. Which happened frequently, especially on the more controversial conferences.


    Several people got either expelled, or disciplined, after discovering that Vax Mail (for VMS 5.5) has a massive security hole. You can place short scripts directly into the subject line. Since the subject line is displayed on receipt of the message (by default, though this can be switched off), it was possible to send e-mail viruses. Many a logic bomb, and a proto-Melissa floated round the wires. The admins at the UG/PoW never fixed the hole, the years I was there, despite knowing about it and knowing that it was being exploited. They considered it easier just to restore off backup tapes, where necessary.


    The joys of spamming was rapidly introduced to every other PoWCON user, when I, along with Paul Walker and a whole bunch of other nerdy types, founded the Telefantasy Society, and thoroughly spammed every conference going. It made absolutely bugger all difference to membership, proving conclusively that spam is useless. Our promotion posters were the only student posters in colour, at the time. The other posters were grotty, b&w, and often looked like they'd been done in crayon at 3am after a drinking binge. Within a month, though, EVERY student society had quality work posted up everywhere. It was amazing!


    The Telefantasy Society was Paul Walker's brainchild, and largely his doing. My input consisted largely of bringing in Sapphire & Steel videos, getting Carole Anne Ford (Susan, from Dr Who) and Mary Tamm (Romana I, from Dr Who) to become honorary members, and being a general pain in the neck, the rest of the time. At one point, we seriously considered remaking "The Prisoner" on campus, and/or a Doctor Who story, but exams (more than anything) interfered with that. Why couldn't they just give us the degrees, and let us do IMPORTANT stuff with our time?!?!


    The only other things that were remotely significant at UG were that the Student Union building was built on such a steep incline, that there was a real possibility of it colliding with the town of Trefforest.; the rain was so bad that umbrellas were not so much waterproof as bullet-proof; and finally, the bus that ran to Hay-on-Wye.


    (For those not familiar with it, Hay-on-Wye is a White Hole, linked to L-Space. There are something like 24 second-hand book dealers there, some operating out of 3-story barns, and one out of the local castle. It's the largest collection of books, ranging from ancient manuscripts to hot-off-the-press novels & technical manuals, anywhere in Europe. It's a Book Geek's paradise.)


    The idea of a kernel geek surviving the ordeal of UG, never mind surviving in a functional enough state of mind to actually do heavy-duty coding, is a staggering achievement. Dave Jones should be awarded an OBE for that alone!

    • Dude, get in contact with me if you read this post.

      In the later days of PoWcon, Dave and self were users. This was after the retirement of the VAX and the moving to VMS on alpha.glam.ac.uk (also now long gone).

      Curse nostalgia...

  • Wow, this was too much to handle, I'm still cleaning up from laughtermath.
  • I wondered what he'd been doing since the Monkees...

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