Linus Torvalds Speaks Out on Future of Linux 520
SlinkySausage writes "Linus Torvalds has laid out his plans for the future of Linux, including the 3.0 kernel [there probably won't be one], problems with the Linux release cycles and which distro he personally runs on his home PC. '"Compile everything by hand" ones simply weren't interesting to me,' Torvalds says."
Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Funny)
guessing he's not a gentoo user :)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
All it is is one command per app install (or less, if one app requires other apps)
ex, if you want to play boson:
Gentoo$ emerge boson (compiles and installs boson, with any cooking instructions you have in your make.conf)
Debian$ apt-get boson (installs precompiled boson, straight from the wrapper under the heat light)
Same amount of work really... You just have more options available in Gentoo
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Compare the performance to the pre-compiled Gentoo, Fedora, or Ubuntu performance
The taste (err, performance) is a lot better with the compiled yourself. And you don't get asked 40-50 questions, or if you do, you forgot to set batch mode.
I use FreeBSD, with a build system similar to Gentoo, and I have two steps more than what I would get with an apt-get situation.
(1) add "CPUTYPE=[whatever-my-cpu-is-here]" t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that most of the people don't know what their CPUTYPE is. I don't know it either and I have actually build the pc from parts on my own. Is it really impossible to autodetect the CPUTYPE?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
mov eax, 0
CPUID
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because the machine doesn't know that it isn't a build server that should be pushing generic x86 packages to every server on your network and therefore shouldn't optimze for quad-core Opterons.
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is that most of the people don't know what their CPUTYPE is. I don't know it either and I have actually build the pc from parts on my own. Is it really impossible to autodetect the CPUTYPE?
Why doesnt this work? What do you mean look at
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Informative)
Tells you *everything* you want to know (possibly even MORE than you wanted to know).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there's a good reason not to automatically set it in this case. Maybe you don't want your binaries fine-tuned for your CPU type. For example, which I was in college, I set up a system for my room mate. It was older, and so I didn't really want to compile everything on it. Instead, I had my Gentoo computer set a CPU type slightly less than it actually was, recompiled everything, and then had his system just download the packages from me.
Anyway, Gentoo isn't the reason Windows users don't switch. I wou
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:4, Informative)
There are many reasons why you would not want the CPU type automatically set; One such reason having been mentioned by another poster (the machine might be a "build machine", so you wouldn't really want everything built for a dual processor, dual core Opteron when you are building for another processor type). It would be nice, now that some folks are putting together a GUI installer for Gentoo, if they added that functionality, though.
You are still failing to understand the build process for Gentoo, though. If I type 'emerge (package', I am never asked any questions. The build options needed are pulled from
To answer your last question, probably not, but I'll counter by telling you that you are worrying about the wrong thing. Anyone wanting to try linux can try Ubuntu or Knoppix. Virtually everything is guessed for them, very few questions asked, many pieces of hardware are detected automatically (and properly, even!), and setup/configured for them. If someone is gung-ho about trying linux, and they *really* want to try Gentoo, then they just need to be prepared to do some things manually (like editing three lines in their make.conf). If they decide they don't want to, then they need to reexamine their priorities.
Why, if this information is available, doesn't the "emerge" pull that info in instead of forcing the user to do it?
Seriously, this is Why Linux is not liked by many, many people. (I really want to get off Windows!)
In the above scenario, a person will be asked a lot of questions unless they put in a "magic" configuration that is readily available by parsing the output of a simple command. Why even ask the user the questions unless the parse of said command fails to return the proper CPU? Am I the only one thinking this?
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:4, Insightful)
This "you have no business compiling..." nonsense is just baseless elitism. Your list has a lot of subtle variants, and the differences between some of them are inconsequential for most users. I've got a couple of compile jobs running at the moment (regression testing patches before I commit them to a subversion repository), and I don't know the CPUTYPE on all of the machines. The finest distinction I usually make is x86-compatible vs. PPC vs. MIPS/SPARC/Alpha/etc. and 32 vs. 64-bits. If I were compiling a high-performance numerical app, it might be worth tracking down more information (e.g. what sort of vector-processing unit is available), but it usually doesn't matter. In a given day, I might be testing my code on Linux on an x86, Opteron, or Itanium processor; on Darwin on a G4, G5, x86-compatible, or x86_64 compatible processor; on AIX/Power5, or perhaps something more obscure. I'm certainly not going to waste a lot brain cycles figuring out the difference between the itanium or itanium2 CPUTYPEs when I've got real work to do.
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:4, Informative)
Compare the performance to the pre-compiled Gentoo, Fedora, or Ubuntu performance
The taste (err, performance) is a lot better with the compiled yourself. And you don't get asked 40-50 questions, or if you do, you forgot to set batch mode."
I call that BS.
binary packages perform as well as any self compiled code out there. i had the same discussion a couple of years ago, when gentoo was all the rage. i went home, dowloaded the source code of both Glibc and GCC and ran a series of kernel compilations first with Debian's i686 optimized packages of both Glibc and GCC, then ran the same tests this time with athlon optimized packages (my CPU at the time was an athlon Tbird running at 1.4 GHZ). The result was a statiscaly negligible 1% (yes, ONE percent) in favor of the athlon optimized code.
You know why such small diference ? it's because modern CPUs are capable of optimizing the code internally themselves. Anandtech and tom's hardware have lots of articles about how this kind of stuff happens. the point being that you can run pentium-optimized code in an athlon or AMD64 optimized code in an intel 64bit Core 2 without loss of performance.
in other words: compiling the code yourself to get better performance is (in the best penn jillette style) BULLSHIT!!!
Oh, and there's another thing. as a professional syadmin, I always favor vendor compiled packages for stability and support. try convincing a middle manager of a fortune 100 company about the advantages of self compiled code, and he'll be glad to staple a copy of their site-support contract with Sun/IBM/HP/Red Hat/whatever to your pink slip.
big companies loathe this kind of adventure with the code that runs their business. whith their asses on the line, they want someone to fix any mistake quickly and efficiently (and binary packages are waaaay quicker than compiling), and if it doesn't work, they want some external party to blame and pay contractual fees.
welcome to the real word, kid.
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Interesting)
I convinced him to try it with just OpenOffice
He sang a different tune. Call bullshit all you want, but I've tried both, and I know which I prefer.
And I never once said that this was a good idea for big companies. Please don't make assumptions that make you look idiotic, as a professional sysadmin whos avoided that mistake but seen others make it, it'll get you a pink slip just as easily.
It's the difference between 1/2 second to open OpenOffice 2.1 vs. 2+ seconds on one of my systems.
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
march has been shown to make (as already stated) VERY little difference on modern processors, but having USE flags that chop out large chunks of a binary that is fully loaded off disk into memory (the process you're using as your yardstick) would accomplish that.
Yet another clueless Gentoo user, I know, I used to be one. Then I realized that the 1.5 seconds I was saving getting into OO.o w
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, but it's completely impossible that the code optimized for your processor is 400% faster than the non-optimized version on something as general as Openoffice. Most of the time spent loading OO is disk IO anyway.
I don't know how you got your numbers or why they are what they are, but they definitely aren't due to differences in optimization flags to the compiler.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't a load time advantage have a LOT more to do with USE flags reducing binary size on Gentoo, not with your march?
Absolutely.
When I ran Gentoo (several years ago) it was on a laptop. For 99% of my binaries, there was no perceptible difference between -O2, -O3, generic i686 or compiled for my architecture (or any combination thereof.) There was, however, a noticeable difference with -Os (compiling for size) and with not compiling against every possible library that I might want to link in. Size was noticeable (though I never ran out of disk space, so it might not have saved me much) and load times were very noticeab
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's really worth it? This sounds more like a pissing competition. I'll stick with my pre-compiled binaries thanks.
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, if you compile something using -march=athlon-xp and then try to run it an intel procesor, it will likely segfault (intel doesn't have 3dnow for example). There is a big difference in terms of performance between using -march and -mtune. -mtune optimizes it for a certain processor while still making it possible to run on others, by using -march you make it
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No I know. It just seems that since people have claimed that the performance difference is felt most on large complicated pieces of software like OO, you would want to go to the trouble of compiling it.
I just recently switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu, and there was one application in particular that I've noticed a huge speed decrease, and that's eclipse.
Yeah eclipse is a pig on my laptop as well (Debian). I don't know how Ubuntu hand
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's happened on all of them to me, and you know what? The best way to get it fixed quickly is to use a distro with a FRIENDLY community which is willing to HELP and ADVISE without being condescending and pedantic. That and google is nice too...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because you don't like the way Gentoo works (when it has the same facilities, minus the GUI) isn't a good reason to go around implying/saying it doesn't support the feature at all.
But as far as I know, it doesn't. Can you ask it for a list of all USE flags that will get involved in recursive compilation before you start, or get it to prompt you as you go? Because from what I saw, if you didn't know that mpg123 was going to get installed as a deep dependency, you'd never know that you needed to configure for it before you started. FreeBSD won't prompt you up-front, either, but at least it can ask you at each new step in the process.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
apt-get install apt-build; man apt-build
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
With Gentoo you can start from a stage 3 install, and you can also install binary packages if you so choose
Why doesn't FreeBSD have the stigma Gentoo does?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For starters, FreeBSD did not go around making fantastic claims about the efficiency of ports-compiled code, nor was recompiling the base system some sort of rite of passage into enlightenment about "how the system works". But mostly it was the fact that it was BSD, which just doesn't have as big of an advocacy culture.
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the FreeBSD community as well as the FreeBSD developers [i]generally[/i] tend to have outgrown the fanboyism displayed by most Gentoo followers? (I'm not knocking the gentoo devs here, btw -far from it- I'm going out of my way to exclude them from the 'fanboy' label.)
Oh, and also because FreeBSD doesn't base it's core OS on a fluxating set of packages that can -and do- hose your system on a regular basis if you try to keep it up to date (meaning FreeBSD has a binary patch mechanism instead of "make 'fuck up my system with the latest packages from sourceforge -k?' ".
Mind you, I don't run FreeBSD (haven't since 4.6), but there's a reason why people who have used Unix for a while look down on Linux in general ("it's friday -time to gratuitously change the scheduler again!") and Gentoo in particular ("more CFLAGS means more vroom!").
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:4, Informative)
Suck it down my friend - Gentoo is the meta distro.
Don't like the Linux? Swap it with FreeBSD + libc + userland.
Only x86 atm.
Sparc64 is almost there - FreeBSD 7 should solve the last issues with with Gentoo Toolchain - namely loading kernel modules.
Actually FreeBSD-7 should also enable Gentoo/FreeBSD on all our arches to be viable as FreeBSD-7 is moving to gcc-4.2 as its base compiler.
We also have a few people working on integrating DragonFly, NetBSD and OpenBSD into the Gentoo fold as well.
Gentoo is NOT about CFLAGS
Gentoo is NOT about speed.
Gentoo is just a platform for developers by developers.
At least, that's my take as a Gentoo dev.
If Joe User wants to use Gentoo then more power to him! He may end up a developer
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I was reading a little (nothing in great detail) about the alternate platforms for gentoo the other day, so you're not presenting something new to me.
BSD -Unix- is a system, developed and planned as a whole unit. Linux -and 'meta' operating systems such as Debian and Gentoo all suffer from a lack of co-ordination. Microsoft gets many things wrong, but their ad in '99 with the illu
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... I'm not a gentoo user, but I think I'd like that kind of restaurant! Not every day, of course, but I'd go there from time to time.
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, you mean you don't think administration=using...hmm...what else is there?
Re:Not a Gentoo user (Score:5, Insightful)
I generally don't "compile by hand," I generally "emerge -atv (packageName)" to install or "emerge -atuvDN world" to update. Nor am I a ricer with my CFLAGS settings. It just plain works smoother than the other distributions I've used. Harp all you want to about "waiting for compiles," but I'm out doing other things while that happens. It's not as if you have to sit and watch the compiler activity scroll past. It's the computer's time being used, not mine.
Back when I was on RedHat, I'd see "package X" that wasn't part of the official distribution. So I'd find an rpm and try to install it. Then I'd find that I needed another library, and go searching for that rpm. Sometimes then things would work. But sometimes I'd find that some package was looking for things in SuSE layout instead of RedHat, or I was grabbing an rpm from somewhere that didn't play well with RedHat for some other reason. There was a non-trivial set of packages that I never could get installed and running.
On Gentoo I've had far fewer problems getting things to run. In fact, I've only had 1 intractable problem compiling from source, and that's been Doomsday, which isn't released for amd64. I've had a few transient problems with source-based packages that have soon gotten fixed. But by and large, my biggest problems have been related to binary-only packages.
Oh, and there's nothing about the usually-disruptive "upgrade to the next release." My system is just up-to-date. A few times a year they issue a new profile, but that's generally about as disruptive as upgrading any other package. The only really disruptive upgrades have been things like udev, gcc and xorg, but even with those it's better to take them one-at-a-time and cope, instead of the usual "practically everything has undergone significant changes" of a distribution upgrade.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
She used Gentoo here at home, but Friday I install her in her freshman dorm room. Dad won't be around to maintain her system for her, and to be quite honest, Gentoo does require frequent low-level maintenance. I wanted her to have something she could *usually* handle entirely on her own, and in this case I figured the popularity of Ubuntu worked in her favor. She can push the update button, I've shown her how to get at synaptic, and a few other basics.
Now for the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
guessing he's not a gentoo user :)
Re: (Score:2)
Granted some of the larger packages can take a bit to compile. That is just the nature of compiling from source. The fact that I can compile from Source, store the binary and install that on another system is REALLY cool.
I've had 3 servers setup before, I only compiled on the faster one. The binary packages were the only things installed on
The future of linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The future of linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The future of linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Cox v Morton (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cox v Morton (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The future of linux (Score:4, Funny)
Instead of DICTATOR, how about just a Colonel?
Colonel Sanders? KFP Linux Distribution! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The future of linux (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No 3.0 ? (Score:5, Funny)
3.0 is a perfect excuse to break everything and allow your imagination to run riot. That's the fun bit!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:No 3.0 ? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'll wait for Linux 3.11 for Workgroups in that case, thank you oh so very much.
Though I guess this gives us the approximate timeline for the 3.0 version - because we know that Linux 95 must soon follow.
89 more years to go, 89 years...
Oh, don't worry. 3.0 is inevitable. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, 1.0 was considered "feature complete" at the time of release, and there are some major architectural changes which will be required in order to improve scalability across multi-core as well as SMP systems, not to mention some fairly major pieces of work that are still under development
Isn't Linux about continual point releases anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, in my mind, to say that there won't be a Linux Kernel 3.0 or a Linux 4.0 or something like that, is actually a GOOD THING. If you want dramatic, shocking, breaking releases that require you to rewrite 95% of your code to do the same thing, if you want to find that what you used suddenly can't work largely because it isn't supported any more, then Microsoft has plenty of that.
So three cheers for point releases, and here's to the death of "major" releases.
Version numbers have always annoyed me (Score:3, Insightful)
The way people and organizations select version numbers has always annoyed me and Linus is spot on on this topic. To me, version numbers are stupid. The only number that really matters is the revision number, all other numbers either encapsulate too much non-sense or require too much "thinking" and "creativity" based on the developer's part. At the end of the day it's just a label to say that this version was created after all of those other versions, nothing more nothing less.
In these days, versions and
Different Programming model... (Score:4, Interesting)
Makes sense... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a lot of new stuff happening, but it's in the main not specific to the kernel. New things the kernels needs to do are thin on the ground now. Not to say it'll ever be finished as such, just that there aren't any needed big new features. It'll take a major new shift in computing to do that, I suspect. Something way bigger than extensions or tweaks to x86/SPARC/PPC/ARM etc. I'm not holding my breath.
I may be stating the obvious, but the site is slashdotted, so I can't see what Linus has apparently said.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hetrogenous cores could also cause changes to the scheduler -- ie having a small number of OOO cores, and a larger number of in order cores -- some threads will run better on one type of core than another.
But for the most part, he's probably right -- the days of rapid large scale architectural changes to the kernel are over.
Technical Merits vs other OSS? (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't want to try and turn this into a Linux vs BSD vs [something else] flamewar here, but since I'm not really qualified to comment on things like memory-management algorithms, I wondered if anyone wanted to weigh in on exactly what areas they think Linux really excels at -- from
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Solaris has ZFS that they like to brag about. On Linux, Ext3 is a very reliable FS and something to be proud of but it's showing its age. fsck times are unbearably long for example. It tends to get fragmented. XFS is a good FS too.
Linux is pretty weak at power management which is crucial in embeded products. The embeded guys used to complain about real time support, but I guess that's OK now.
OpenB
coral cache (Score:4, Informative)
Significance news: not much. Life is good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Which would imply a stability that leads to dependability which leads to usability which leads to widespread use. At least that is my hope in the enterprise, that the combination of commodity hardware with a commodity, high powered and stable OS can be coupled with increasingly powerful database engines such as mySQL, Veritas, etc. Oracle on Linux is now considered stable as well.
At home? stability leading to dependability leading to integration leading to crossover applications that will no longer depend on a proprietary OS stack to function. The only thing missing from my desired tool set on Linux right now is basically an easy to use, high powered MIDI to music recording and notation system -- and the pieces for all of that is already there -- it's my time to research and integrate the pieces that is in short supply.
I guess my point is that stability and upgradeability cause me to buy (several Linuxes and Win2K). Give me yet a large bulkier OS that doesn't really do much but add coolness (Vista or even XP) and I yawn.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Depending on what kind of infrastructure you needed, six or seven years ago, you were fairly likely to get funny looks if you ann
coral cache (Score:2, Informative)
Drop Bears? (Score:3, Informative)
I hope he was told the truth about Drop Bears [wikipedia.org] and that he was kidding...
PffT (Score:4, Funny)
I want collapsable threads! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing against Gentoo, but this was a horrible example when this would've been a really useful Slashdot feature.
Re:I want collapsable threads! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I want collapsable threads! (Score:5, Informative)
Works for me.
Re:already slashdoted (Score:4, Informative)
http://apcmag.com.nyud.net:8090/7012/linus_torval
Re: (Score:2)
Next!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
By the way, you can install the Slashdotter [mozilla.org] Firefox extension and automatically get all 3 cache links appended to every link in an article summary. Very handy.
Article text (Score:5, Informative)
Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world's mission critical server infrastructures.
The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?
I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges.
APC: Writing an operating system kernel is a hard job. Why did you write Linux in the first place?
LT: Kernels may be hard, but partly because of that they are also interesting. I've always been more interested in "down to the hardware" details than in fluffy stuff like user interfaces etc, and an operating system kernel is about as down to the hardware as you can get without actually building it yourself (which I've also done - I was at a CPU company for seven years, after all). So I'm not into soldering irons etc, but I very much enjoy working at a low level, and thinking about how my software actually interacts with the CPU and other parts of the system. Besides, I really didn't realize how hard it would be. I really never expected to be still working on it 15+ years later
APC: What's the Linux Foundation?
LT: Heh. I just work here, you should ask some of the people who are actually involved in all the other things that LF does. It's basically the combination of OSDL ("Open Source Development Labs") and FSG ("Free Standards Group"), and is a vendor-neutral place for different organizations to discuss the issues they have, and trying to help Linux along. Part of what LF does is pay me to maintain the kernel.
APC: What are you doing with the kernel now? Are you working on it full time? What parts of it do you work on the most?
LT: I very much work on it full time, but I no longer really work on any particular "part"of it - I end up spending almost all my time on not writing kernel code myself, but on working with the flow of code and merging it all.
In fact, the biggest amount of actual source code I've written in the last two years is not in the kernel itself, but in the tool I use to just track the kernel development (called "git" - a source control management system).
So I still get to write code (and I send out suggested patches quite often - but usually they are along the lines of "so here's how we could handle this issue..." in order to prod others to actually do the final patch and testing). But what I do a lot more is go through other peoples changes and say "yes" or "no".
APC: The 2.6 series kernel has been around for a long time. Why?
LT: We used to have these big and painful development releases that took several years, and it worked reasonably well and people got very used to it ("2. is stable, 2. is development"), but it had serious downsides too.
In particular, the release cycles were so long that all the commercial vendors effectively had to back-port a fair amount of new code from the development kernels, and so development code ended up in the stable releases. Also, conversely, the vendors fixed problems in the stable versions, and sometimes the fixes were missed or weren't easy to then forward-port to the development series, because the two were just very far apart.
Basically, a multi-year development cycle simply doesn't work. It was reasonable and required for a while (we did some pretty radical changes there too), but with 2.6, the base kernel is in good shape, and we've improved our development process enough that we just don
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I've always felt that it does the
Re:Intel lover (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Is Linus too much of a nerd? (Score:5, Insightful)
The phrase "My name is Legion for we are many" comes to mind.
Example, at work here, Fedora suits our needs perfectly. While at home, Ubuntu powers my sons desktop and Gentoo is my servers backbone. Yet, when I need to take apps from home, they run with minimal problem. They isolate the desktop from the apps that run on it, giving you infinite flexibility. Yes, it can be overwhelming. Yes, it does not look like a unified front. But by doing this, Linux can be, and is, whatever you need it to be! Hell, my gentoo box doesn't even have a monitor! I ssh in, or when that fails, I have an old teletype in case of emergencys.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words...you need a lot of different kinds of people to build an operating system. Linus never claimed to be the benevolent dictator of an operating system - just of the Lin
Re:Is Linus too much of a nerd? (Score:5, Informative)
Linux doesn't have a GUI, dude. You should read about Linux more, and write about it less.
Linus is the creator of, and remains deeply involved with the development of the Linux operating system kernel. "The GUI" isn't his concern. (Though providing the underlying services to support it is.)
Also, I don't think Linus much cares about Linux being "mainstream". He just wants it to be the best!
-Peter
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux's UI is based on MIT's X-Windows (why not "MIT/Linux"?) and either FSF's Gnome or KDE, though, so yes, it's not Linus' purview to worry about Linux's UI, so his geekiness on that matter is
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your claims about the mainstream are sorta valid, but that's not Linus' fight - he doesn't really care about it, and just wants to help make the best kernel he can on techincal merit alone. The interview giv
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Unless, of course, Ubuntu gets open source video drivers...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be a mistake to think that Linux is the "head honcho" of the Linux operating system. He is voluntarily in charge of the Linux kernel, but he isn't really involved in other things, like designing the GUIs that run on top, or marketing the OS to the public. So, basically, Linus sh
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As good as a kernel developer as he may be, I still think he'd be valuable reconciling the problems that the diffe
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a lot of truth to that. People listen to him, and if he took a stand on various large-scale issues, it would have an effect. If he picked a particular distro, and said "everyone use this," then maybe people would migrate towards that. Then again, he
Re:Straight from the penguin's mouth... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even advancements in multi-core technology would not require a 3.x series kernel (unless I'm mistaken in my belief that the 2.6.x series supports multi-core CPU's), simply because once you cam make a dual-core CPU functional with the kernel, expanding that functionality to 4, 8, or even 64 cores is simply an expanding of the current code. And even if the current kernel does not support multi-core CPU's, that would be more of a 2.8.x series, rather than an entirely new kernel version.
Okay, okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Enough with the Vista bashing, we're sorry.
Microkernel [or How to get Flamed in Slashdot] (Score:4, Funny)
I guess that a 3.0 version would be a suitable "label" to a conversion of the Linux kernel into a Microkernel [wikipedia.org] architecture, I am not saying that it is going to be done, but I think that with the development of multicore technology and the overall new technology a microkernel architecture seems plausible.
In any case, I assume that just a modification of such size would make the version major worth of being changed.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've read that thread before and it never really seems to get into microkernel vs. monolithic, it's really more about Andy starting a fight by saying "Linux is losing" and then Linus responding, in his fasion, though most of the skirmishing happens outside of the kernel structure argument.
Linus basically says, "Yeah, it's monolithic, but it provides a complete Unix userland and runs on i386 and is libre." AT's response is "What difference does it make if it's libre if you need this weird 'Intel' chip that
Re:Debian/Ubuntu (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Politics of Hypocrisy (Score:4, Insightful)
People who claim that Torvalds should be doing this or saying that should examine their own positions and honestly consider if they're not simply trying to use him and his position within the community to try and further a particular POV.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Leaving aside that a lot of what you say is unfounded crap, and so hardly likely to have any "push", Linus hardly pushes any views. He expresses t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had drives formatted ext2/ext3/ntfs/reiser/hfs/hpfs/ProDOS/xfs/Fat etc. Why is ZFS any better or worse?
Do you have any benchmarks to share for ZFS or are we just supposed to assume your word is final. Unlike Windows, with Linux/BSD/FreeDOS etc. you can post your ZFS personal benchmarks and opinions and not get sued.
I'm not trying to start a fight, thanks.
Enjoy,