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I haven't done it on a Mac, only on a PC under Linux (more or less following this documentation). You may have to find an alternate tool to send the ATA Security commands to the drive, if hdparm isn't working.

Mind you, the drive has to support ATA Security commands (some may not) and has to be in an 'unfrozen' state (many BIOSes/EFI firmware freezes the drive at boot). This may mean you'd need to power cycle (disconnect/connect) the drive while the computer is running to unfreeze it (which, as long as the drive is entirely unmounted, is safe for an SATA drive). You might also be able to boot with it disconnected and plug it once booted instead.

There seems to be some information (some similar to what I've already mentioned) specifically pertaining to Macs/OSX here, though I haven't tested it.

Pretty much only the kernel is open source and not the other parts.

This is incorrect. Most of android is in AOSP, including the kernel, dalvik, UI, launcher, dialer, all the libs etc. You can build a fully working system from the open source components (that's how cyanogenmod is built).

Only the google-specific applications (Maps, gmail, gtalk, google market, facebook, google voice ) are not open source. Many of them can be replaced with alternatives if one wants to release a system without paying to google: e.g. SlideMe market, one of many different e-mail/gps apps, etc.

You can check the AOSP contents here.

Nah, plenty are open: http://android.git.kernel.org/. Dunno about Market, though.

Also of interest: Linux's CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capabilities flag, which would allow giving a process the ability to attach to lower-than-1024 ports without giving it full root.

That's exactly my point. If betterunixthanunix wants to treat "Fedora", "Ubuntu", and other popular distributions as separate platforms, as shown in this comment

Hold on there, Tiger. I just read that comment in its entirety and he didn't actually use the word "platform". He said operating system which is valid. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora are not the same operating system, however, they do share the same platform. Just like Windows 2k/XP and Vista/7 aren't the same operating systems, they do share a platform and can all run most of the same programs more or less. The only real difference is Windows all comes from MS and Linux comes from whoever feels like putting a distro together or http://www.kernel.org./

That's not /dev/null, that's a deleted file. /dev/null does *nothing* with anything written into it and attempting to read from it yields 0 characters read: source, around line 618.

When however, you create a file, open, and delete it, then as long as your handle exists, the refcount of the inode won't reach zero and it won't be collected by the filesystem. This is a rather common practice.

Looking at the GNU Coding Standard which is used for gcc, whatever 'best practices' and style guideline they come with will make a good fireplace material ...

Well, in 2.6.33 (relatively modern, didn't check newer versions) Rx and Tx are stored in the struct net_device_stats (/include/linux/netdevice.h), both as unsigned longs. On 32 bit computers that is (IIRC) a 32bit int =4 Gig, far less than 250 Gig we are talking about.

Who built with that rather than using the optimized version?

http://mirrors.kernel.org/gentoo/releases/arm/autobuilds/current-stage3/

Done

You don't need to audit Android to know it sends a lot of data back to Google. You just need to use it.

• You need a Google account to use the phone. Every search you do with Google is logged-in and confirmed to be you. On the other hand, general browsing (including bookmarks and web history) is not logged to Google. You can check here if you like.
• Your entire phonebook has to go into Google Contacts - or you don't get a phonebook. As this is a fancy smartphone, it's not just useful to have name and number, but also email addresses, social media login names and even postal address (e.g. for driving directions on Google Maps)
• Every search you do with the multi-purpose search bar is sent to Google regularly as you type it - assuming, of course, that you don't turn off the Google Search provider, which you can do but it would make the search bar significantly less useful.
• Google want you to use Buzz, and they'd ideally like you to give away your location when you do Buzz, even if what you're Buzzing is irrelevant to your location.
• Google has a fantastic location-finding-without-GPS algorithm, which works by having millions of samples of "I was on this cell tower / wifi router and this is my GPS location". It used to be quid-pro-quo, where you couldn't get this estimated location for yourself without committing to uploading your location to Google for each cell tower / wifi router you encounter. However, now it's possible to check a box that says "use the location DB, but don't contribute to it".
• Speaking of location, who the fuck uses Google Latitude? A tool for broadcasting to your "friends" where you are and when?
• Even if you're not so mad as to use Latitude, you're still giving away your location to Google whenever you hit "My Location" - it shows you your location and it gets the map tiles to show from Google by asking for them with your logged-in identity. So Google knows roughly where you are whenever you look up your own location.
• This happens constantly if you use Google Maps with Navigation to get your free sat nav.
• Don't forget that Google reads all your mail if you use GMail. But there's also another regular email app on the phone, which never sends data to Google. Check for yourself.

On the bright side, all this data you have on your phone isn't available to all - Android is far more effectively sandboxed than the iPhone. Apps have to get the user to agree up front what access they're allowed to private data and phone features. For example, there are several games I wanted to install, but when I saw they wanted permission to get at my private phone data, I said "fuck that" and refused to install them.

If the user says "yes" to an app's permissions, the apps can't wangle any extra permissions. The developers need to release a new version begging for more permissions, and the user again gets the choice to say "yes" or "no". If they say "no", they still keep the old version, so you can't force them to say "yes".

Apps can't access other apps data, unless those other apps let them. So what Google collects on you is only available to Google, not any other Tom, Dick or Harry who writes an app, like on the iPhone.

Google is always looking to offer Faustian pacts - you give us an insight into aspects of your life, and we'll make your life better. And, like Steve Jobs' walled garden appstore, it's a take-it-or-leave-it approach.

Personally, I use my Android phone every day and love it, but that's because I already got hooked on Google Search and GMail years ago. Google already own me privacy. Uploading to their hivemind isn't so bad. But you don't have to if you don't want to.

You don't need to audit Android to know it sends a lot of data back to Google. You just need to use it.

• You need a Google account to use the phone. Every search you do with Google is logged-in and confirmed to be you. On the other hand, general browsing (including bookmarks and web history) is not logged to Google. You can check here if you like.
• Your entire phonebook has to go into Google Contacts - or you don't get a phonebook. As this is a fancy smartphone, it's not just useful to have name and number, but also email addresses, social media login names and even postal address (e.g. for driving directions on Google Maps)
• Every search you do with the multi-purpose search bar is sent to Google regularly as you type it - assuming, of course, that you don't turn off the Google Search provider, which you can do but it would make the search bar significantly less useful.
• Google want you to use Buzz, and they'd ideally like you to give away your location when you do Buzz, even if what you're Buzzing is irrelevant to your location.
• Google has a fantastic location-finding-without-GPS algorithm, which works by having millions of samples of "I was on this cell tower / wifi router and this is my GPS location". It used to be quid-pro-quo, where you couldn't get this estimated location for yourself without committing to uploading your location to Google for each cell tower / wifi router you encounter. However, now it's possible to check a box that says "use the location DB, but don't contribute to it".
• Speaking of location, who the fuck uses Google Latitude? A tool for broadcasting to your "friends" where you are and when?
• Even if you're not so mad as to use Latitude, you're still giving away your location to Google whenever you hit "My Location" - it shows you your location and it gets the map tiles to show from Google by asking for them with your logged-in identity. So Google knows roughly where you are whenever you look up your own location.
• This happens constantly if you use Google Maps with Navigation to get your free sat nav.
• Don't forget that Google reads all your mail if you use GMail. But there's also another regular email app on the phone, which never sends data to Google. Check for yourself.

On the bright side, all this data you have on your phone isn't available to all - Android is far more effectively sandboxed than the iPhone. Apps have to get the user to agree up front what access they're allowed to private data and phone features. For example, there are several games I wanted to install, but when I saw they wanted permission to get at my private phone data, I said "fuck that" and refused to install them.

If the user says "yes" to an app's permissions, the apps can't wangle any extra permissions. The developers need to release a new version begging for more permissions, and the user again gets the choice to say "yes" or "no". If they say "no", they still keep the old version, so you can't force them to say "yes".

Apps can't access other apps data, unless those other apps let them. So what Google collects on you is only available to Google, not any other Tom, Dick or Harry who writes an app, like on the iPhone.

Google is always looking to offer Faustian pacts - you give us an insight into aspects of your life, and we'll make your life better. And, like Steve Jobs' walled garden appstore, it's a take-it-or-leave-it approach.

Personally, I use my Android phone every day and love it, but that's because I already got hooked on Google Search and GMail years ago. Google already own me privacy. Uploading to their hivemind isn't so bad. But you don't have to if you don't want to.

I find some of the features interesting, but until these problems are solved, I will not try it out.

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Gotchas

Obviously, Btrfs also does volume management without LVM. It even manages to do better than ZFS in some areas, for example Btrfs can reduce the pool capacity easily thanks to back references (a new and cool fs technique which is being incorporated to Btrfs), whereas ZFS still can't reduce the capacity of a pool and it will take a lot of complexity to implement it (you really should read the link)

Hmm... I am going to pass for now on servers. I might try it on desktops/workstations. Not that I use Ubuntu at all. Btrfs is supported by kernel 2.6.32 on other distros as well if you care to configure it properly.

I remember failure stories with other latest and greatest filesystems lately and I will let others continue to test and identify bugs before I use it on servers/SAN with critical data.

From the btrfs wiki https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page :

btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux...

Btrfs is under heavy development, but every effort is being made to keep the filesystem stable and fast. As of 2.6.31, we only plan to make forward compatible disk format changes, and many users have been experimenting with Btrfs on their systems with good results. Please email the Btrfs mailing list if you have any problems or questions while using Btrfs.

An even bigger step was the displacing of email by texting on cellphones. Show me the RFC describing how I can make my own texting client for my cellphone.

How about source code?

gPXE (the Etherboot project) is used in Fedora's BFO project (based on BKO). If you have a local server, that is a cool project

I'm sorry that PXE and Etherboot get no love around here. I've been using Etherboot since ~2000, when it was the common boot method for LTSP (and K12LTSP). EB and gPXE are awesome projects that show how much you can do with so little space to work with.

When network booting several computers, I've found the boot to be much faster over the network than locally once the first computer is booted and the server has the files in memory. I wasn't even using GbE.

cf. Anatomy of real-time Linux architectures and the Real-Time Linux Wiki

Odd, I'm looking at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ and the latest kernel I see is 2.6.33, and that comes in at a whopping 81 megabytes for the compressed tarball.

Hey, look better and you'll find that the .bz2 compressed tarball is 63 MB.

Anyway, if we look at the uncompressed size of some other projects, we see that, for instance, vim is 60M, glibc takes 188 MB, kde is 1,5 GB and tex (binary) is 2 GB! In comparison, Linux seems pretty average to me.

Apple has managed to write their driver stack in C++ with AFAIK no binary compatibility breakage since they switched from GCC 2.95 to GCC 3 way back in 2003....

Sigh, in the GNU world, we've had much more frequent C++ ABI breakages, so when I hear "C++" and "binary compatibility" in the same phrase, I start to be afraid ;) .

The latest linux kernel weighs 60 MB;

Odd, I'm looking at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ and the latest kernel I see is 2.6.33, and that comes in at a whopping 81 megabytes for the compressed tarball. Extracted, it takes almost 434 megabytes. That's over twelve minutes of DVD-quality video. That's two-thirds of a CD-R. That's ten times the size of the Mac OS X kernel. That's two months of bandwidth at the lowest tier of cell phone service.... You get the idea. It's freaking huge. The kernel sources were too big way back in 2.2. Now, they're just pure comedy.

Also, remember that source control systems add a significant performance penalty that is also proportional to the number of files, not just the number of bytes. So although the giant compressed tarball may take only five minutes to download from kernel.org (which is an eternity), I'd expect a source checkout to take a good bit longer.

But doesn't "just overriding one method in a class" mean changing a function pointer?

The point wasn't that there's an underlying difference, but rather that the syntax of a class hierarchy tends to result in design patterns in which the things that need to be part of the class are part of the class and not part of some giant library of functions. The result is that instead of the semi-OO design pattern of using pointers for only the functions that you already know will need to be replaced, you have a true OO design pattern where any of them can be replaced without having to push for changes to thousands of lines of code all over the place that refer to that function.

It's not that if you use a derived class for your driver, all the other drivers will magically use the derived class instead of the one they were designed and compiled for.

I never suggested that they would. Why would they need to? There should be no accidental interaction between drivers. Any instances of variables shared between two unrelated drivers should be deliberate and rare. I should be able to make changes to my copy of the ATA core code without breaking your driver. That said, if you want the ability to do things like that, Objective-C categories would work.... :-D

Also consider that C++ is less supported on embedded systems, and has a much more complex (and changing) ABI than C.

All the more reason to use a limited subset of C++ (no exceptions, no templates, etc.) and to freeze the parts of the ABI that the kernel uses. Apple has managed to write their driver stack in C++ with AFAIK no binary compatibility breakage since they switched from GCC 2.95 to GCC 3 way back in 2003.... (Okay, so the CPU architecture change was something of a binary compatibility breakage, but you know what I mean.)

Taken from the Playstation.com forums (nice work!):
----------------

CREDIT goes to Xrobx who posted these in another thread and i wanted to make sure that everyone sees them...

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.:
"In addition to playing games, watching movies, listening to music, and viewing photos, you can use the PS3 system to run the Linux operating system. By installing the Linux operating system, you can use the PS3 system not only as an entry-level personal computer with hundreds of familiar applications for home and office use, but also as a complete development environment for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.)."
http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html

(http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:byasL-PxEiMJ:www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html+http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=cln
k&gl=us&client=safari) - google's cached page of the above hyperlink from March 30th 2010 which does not say anything about FW 3.21 removing Other OS. I've saved the page in case it goes offline, copy http address into browser as link probably won't work. Or, just search google and get the cached page. - kiyyto.

Phil Harrison, February 2007,
President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios 2005-2008:
"One of the most powerful things about the PS3 is the 'Install Other OS' option."
http://kotaku.com/235049/20-questions-with-phil-harrison-at-dice

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., 2006-2009:
"The Linux Distributor's Starter Kit provides information, binary and source codes to Linux Distribution developers who wants to make their distro support PS3."
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux

Izumi Kawanishi, Sony, May 2006:
"Because we have plans for having Linux on board [the PS3], we also recognize Linux programming activities... Other than game studios tied to official developer licenses, we'd like to see various individuals participate in content creation for the PS3."
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9290

Geoffrey Levand, August 2009,
Principal Software Engineer at Sony Corporation:
"Please be assured that SCE is committed to continue the support for previously sold models that have the "Install Other OS" feature and that this feature will not be disabled in future firmware releases."
mailing list to PS3 customers using Linux

Phil Harrison, May 2006,
President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios 2005-2008:
"The Playstation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC."
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,418642,00.html
SONY
Make.Believe... you didn't see that

Things get interesting internationally because the 2.4GHz ISM band is defined differently in each country (but loosely based around the three ITU regions). There is a good reference list on Wikipedia. For example, most of the world can use channels 1-13, but North American users are limited to channels 1-11 at full power (12 & 13 can be used at reduced power -- but that's too complicated for most people so the channels are restricted). Spain used to be limited to channels 10 & 11 and France to 10-13, but this has been changed as the two countries harmonise with the rest of Europe.

The nice database at Linux Wireless lists frequencies and power levels. Israel is listed as having a 2.4GHz band of 2402.000 - 2482.000 MHz with a max power of 100mW. The US band is 2402.000 - 2472.000 (narrower) with a maximum power of 500mW (much higher). If the iPad is actually running 0.5W at 2.4GHz I can see why the Israeli authorities will be a bit cranky. Australia & the UK have the 100mW limits, but people in NZ with iPads (such as @lisatickledpink) will be fine since the power limit is 1000mW (woo hoo!)

If Apple had been sensible and limited the power output to 100mW across the board then there would be no trouble with WiFi across borders, and perhaps that is what most laptop manufacturers have done (to avoid the wifi cards being ripped out at Customs)?

We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.

Hate to break it to you but most web sites you could ever even think of accessing will be hosting copyrighted material. That's right not just potentially hosting copyrighted material but actually hanging up copyrighted material for anyone to download.

To avoid getting copyrighted material, you'd have to find a country that did not sign the Berne Convention treaty, but even then the material might be under copyright. Alternately, even the countries in the Berne Convention treaty might have material online that has been made Public Domain either because the copyright expire or the rights holder (not the creator) put it into the public domain. Even then you'll have to download (and read) pages of copyrighted information to get at the PD stuff.

Alternately you can just download as much copyrighted material as you want. Try starting from these sites:

• SourceForge
• CreativeCommons
• Linux Kernel Archives
• arXiv
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• NetBSD
• Oracle
• Sun
• Haiku
• Internet Archive
• and so on

And remember, there's more where that came from.

When the industry as a whole moved from C and C++ to Java in the late 1990s, one of our main problems was the bloat that Java brought to the table. Memory consumption was a real issue, as was its slow nature. Things have improved somewhat, mainly driven by vast hardware advances.

Interesting take - unfortunately incorrect. Java's performance issues were almost entirely due to the interpreted nature of its code. When it was originally released, all Java code was interpreted by the JVM. The result is similar to running code through an emulator ... often usable, but certainly not competitive with native applications. The introduction of Just-in-time compilation to Java (via HotSpot and similar runtime engines) made all the difference in the world. By Java 1.2 (1998), the JRE came equipped with HotSpot and basic performance became an (often inappropriately cited) non-issue. Hardware advances played as much a role in speeding up Java as it did any other language.

Now, when we moved from C and C++ to Java, we did get a huge productivity boost, even if our apps themselves were more bloated and ran slower. Apps that would've taken us a year to develop using C++ could be finished in a couple of months using Java. We could also develop much more complex software than we could using C++. So Java did offer some real benefits, and that's why it became popular.

More info can be found with Google.

Most of the benefits offered by Java are those bestowed upon an application by virtue of running in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), including automatic memory management (garbage collection), strong exception handling, cross-platform portability, sandboxed code execution, security controls, dynamic class generation, to name a few. Java's syntax is also familiar and effective, and caters to many newer programming models and paradigms. Nothing about Java allows applications to be more complex than they were before... I dare you to find something as complex as the Linux Kernel, or something whose complexity is handled better in Java than via a C++ toolkit like QT. Java's advantages have always been related to its abilities to simplify coding challenges, allowing more effective, secure, and functional code to be produced faster (and with a lower learning curve).

We can't say the same for Flash and HTML5, however. They both suffer from far worse bloat than Java ever did. For instance, take watching videos on YouTube. I just did that using Firefox on Linux, and the Firefox process is now using 3966 MB of RAM. That's its resident usage, not virtual usage, as well. Its virtual usage is currently 4512 MB.

This is certainly a bit subjective. For example, my Firefox running on Linux watching YouTube is only using 80MB of memory, with Flash's "npviewer.bin" adding another 10MB. However, RAM usage is not a bad thing. Traditionally, when RAM came in far smaller quantities than it did now, developers frequently traded extra CPU cycles and disk I/O to conserve memory. Now, it's almost the opposite. A good application, especially a foreground application like a web browser, will use RAM liberally to conserve bottleneck resources like CPU, bandwidth, and I/O. Most of the time, the application profiles the environment that it is running in and chooses how much RAM it will use for optimization based on that profile. A system with 1GB of RAM will likely have big applications like Firefox use significantly less memory than one with 8

David Gerard points out that Nouveau is going into Linux 2.6.33.

Tubal-Cain points out that the use of past tense on "going" was unnecessary.

Who says it's a penguin? It could be kernel 2.6.29 after all it's used in Australia.. (link)

- Preemptable (Linux isn't)

Sure it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux

Or just a patchset:

http://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT_Patch

Now, see? You had a perfect chance to enlighten me and show show some class while doing it, but you chose instead to be an a**hole and display your immaturity. As for understanding the 2TB problem, I've been a programmer since 1965 (the Army had me doing cryptology, on 8k machines, in assembly), and have a pretty good understanding of most of the basics of computer science, including the math behind the hardware design. I worked for Honeywell in the late '60's and early '70's and we were one of the first systems to implement striping across drives.

The original poster specifically mentioned RAID5, and I should have titled my post "Beware of RAID5". He also said that he was doing compressed archives. Since the data doesn't need to be online there is no reason to have an expensive RAID array when a dockable disk set and tar will do the job (or something similar if he's not using UNIX).

In your favor, though, I haven't implemented a RAID6 array for any of my clients. I mostly work with smaller systems and weird technical programming problems. I really don't know how RAID6 performs in real life under emergency conditions. I can, however, recount at least 5 instances in the last two years where I've been called in to retrieve data that was lost and could not be restored from a "foolproof" backup because the system was poorly conceived. I've just re-read this article, http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hpa/raid6.pdf and am still under the impression that the problem comes from a guaranteed failure occurring that shuts down the process. Perhaps you would be kind enough to point me to an authoritative source that shows why this wouldn't occur in array of four or more drives where all the drives are subject to an error once in 10^14 bits?

Thank you.

That this particular bug "fixes" itself in a relatively short span of time.

According to the documentation provided for PS3 linux, the clock that is embedded in the PS3 cannot actually be manipulated from under the hypervisor:

"Similar to a PC, a built-in real time clock (RTC) keeps the wall clock time for the PS3. The RTC is backed up by a battery and so ticks even if external power is removed. The RTC value can be read by a hypervisor call, but it can not be written. The RTC value monotonically increases and never rolls back. The PS3 Linux platform support uses the standard RTC userland interface /dev/rtc, The standard hwclock command can be used to manage the RTC. Since the RTC is read only, the PS3 Linux platform support maintaines a value in system flash memory that represents the difference between the hardware RTC value and the Linux RTC value."

I'm assuming that this read-only clock "feature" is in some way related to DRM, to keep people from playing tricks with expiration dates. Worst case scenario, it is impossible to modify the RTC without hardware tinkering. Had this not been a transient bug, that would have meant massive physical recalls. More likely, it is possible for sony-blessed firmware updates to modify the clock. However, Sony can only push those either through the internet, or on physical disks. Since the bug was preventing PSN logins, the internet option wouldn't have been automatically available(though, since the issue is transient, it now is again). They would either have to mail out upgrade disks to affected users, bundle the upgrade with future game releases, or make their customers go to some support site and burn their own upgrade disks. Gigantic pain in the ass.

You asked for "actively maintained", not "complete". And Reiser4 is sponsored by DARPA and Linspire, so it's not exactly dead. I can easily find an update from Feb 8: http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/edward/reiser4/reiser4-for-2.6/

ZFS will probably have to be reimplemented somehow to go on Linux. We'll have to wait for ext5 or 6 to get a reasonable subset of ZFS feature list.

Sort of. There will probably never be an ext5, ext4 will be stabilised at some point. The future 'standard Linux filesystem' with ZFS features is intended to be BTRFS and it's well on the way (in the mainline Linux kernel but not ready for general use just yet).

http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

However, the fact that Oracle is the priciple driver behind BTRFS, but now owns Sun and thus could GPL ZFS does obviously cast some doubt on the future of both - although they can both carry on with non-Oracle devlopers, it will obviously be very important which one Oracle throws its weight behind (they're surely unlikely to give them both equal resources).

Well according to the wikipedia info (not sure how up to date it is) - the problem is that Sun chose (on purpose) an open license (CDDL) that makes distributing a derivative work of it and GPL software illegal.

Even a clean room implementation may have issues due to patents.

You can apparently try to run it in userspace (that's the FUSE stuff the other posters are talking about) but that's a messy solution for sure.

Chances are we'll have a production btrfs before we get an in-kernel ZFS implementation.

I agree with you, but I believe you to be wrong on a technical point. The license applied to the kernel is the GPLv2 with the specific stipulation that the userspace boundary was not considered a derivative work by the author. Otherwise, I believe distributing a binary that linked with the Linux kernel would have been a GPL violation (depending on the weird interpretation about OS/tools libraries "get out of jail free" clause in the GPLv2).

See COPYING from the linux kernel. The absolute top clarifies the copyright owners distinctions.

The thing about the GPL is that it isn't "viral" despite what folks claim. It merely has terms of usage, just like virtually any other software. When found in violation of the terms, the easiest way to comply happens to be to release your source. You could stop using the GPL software and move along. The only person who can take you to court over the GPL is a copyright holder. Your "customers" sure can't. So if Linus says: "I don't consider that a derivative work", in the legal document describing it, he'll have a really hard time telling folks in court: "I think that's a derived work, and they are in violation of my license".

Kirby

It's not even in the kernel, so it doesn't matter when the kernel was written. The problem is in userland, the partitioning utility in particular.

'util-linux' hasn't been updated since 2005. How much you want to be your Linux distro is using 'fdisk' from five years ago?

Luckily, someone got busy today and updated the util-linux-ng 'fdisk' to start partitions at 1MB, unless the device is super small and each megabyte matters.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=utils/util-linux-ng/util-linux-ng.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/master

Now all we have to do is have the distros pick it up.

Problem solved. It probably took less than ten minutes of coding. Arguably, it should have been solved years ago. I know I've been aligning my partitions to 64K or 1MB bounds for four years (I got hip to this stuff when I started virtualizing things).

No. Drivers need to be merged to mainline. The kernel devs have been trying to hammer this point through for ages.

The reason of course is that there is no stable kernel API, and the developers are completely uninterested in maintaining one... And it's not necessary if all drivers are part of the mainline.

I know it sounds like circular logic, but the documentation at http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt clarifies the reasoning.

Oh come on, was it really a surprise to anyone that Google does only care about OSS when it suits them and drops out instantly when it doesn't. All of their own sites, business and back-end technology is just as closed as Microsoft's.

Point 1) how is not pushing to mainline code "dropping out" of open source development exactly?

Point 2) The Common Android Kernel tree is browsable, and looks to be fairly easy for anyone to take advantage of. The complaint here seems to be that Google isn't putting in enough work to merge their Linux kernel changes into the mainline, not that they have failed to release anything in a usable way. I find it somewhat disingenuous to slap down an open source contributor for failing to do our work for us.

Point 3) Microsoft's services are just as open?! Great, where is Microsoft's instructions on how I can export all of my data from all of their services in open formats? Google provides that so I'm certain you're aware of where Microsoft publishes such information as well... Oh and while you're at it, how many open source projects do Microsoft projects contribute to? Python, Linux, and dozens of other existing projects get updates from Google and they've released more open source software of their own making than anyone else.

So, what company have you been watching that confused you so badly that you thought Google wasn't the single largest benefactor open source has?

Oracle has repeatedly stated that Solaris, along with SPARC, is going to have increased investment.

What would they replace Solaris with? Linux?

Please.

Linux isn't even 64-bit safe enough to allow single IO operations greater than 2 gigabytes:

+/*
+ * rw_verify_area doesn't like huge counts. We limit
+ * them to something that fits in "int" so that others
+ * won't have to do range checks all the time.
+ */

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-2.6-stable.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/CodingStyle;h=8bb37237ebd25b19759cc47874c63155406ea28f;hb=HEAD

Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes
the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a
80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need
more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix
your program.

And yes, sometimes I do read and write code on 80-character terminals.

I've discovered something nice about using this in C++. The body of a function defined inside a class is implicitly inline, and so it should be very simple. The extra initial indentation immediately gives less space for any complicated functions.

I don't know about the other VCSs, but for git at least, there are a shit-ton of interopability scripts.

What the h--- is the "kernel" community? Are we talking about popcorn farmers?

http://kernel.org/

Note that it doesn't say "Linux" in the URL anywhere. Some things should be obvious in a given place and time - especially on Slashdot.

Is the new Nvidia functionality solely for the graphics cards or does it also mean improved support for Nvidia chipsets like the MCP78S.

I guess what I'm really asking is: is there any chance the next kernel will fix this, or will using USB microphones and CDMA modems on my Pavilion P6130F remain a pipedream?

The filesystem they should have used, is btrfs, http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

But I guess it's a bit too early yet. I'm running it on a 1Tb without any problems and it is F-A-S-T.

Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible.

It's ready for benchmarking, it's just not ready for widespread use yet. If Google was looking for a filesystem to make a switch to in the near future, BTRFS simply isn't an option quite yet.

It's really easy at this point to move from EXT2 to EXT4 (I believe you can simply remount the partition as the new filesystem, maybe change a flag or two, and away you go). It's basically free performance. If Google is convinced it's stable, there isn't much reason not to do this. It could act as an interim filesystem until something significantly better - such as BTRFS - gets to the point where it's dependable. The fact BTRFS was not mentioned here doesn't mean it's completely ruled out.

SysRQ can be extremely useful in figuring out why a machine has locked up or become unresponsive...

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysrq.txt

This is the interwebz. Next time please hyperlink something like madvise(2) in an informative type post.

actually, i just decided to have a look at patchwerk and as luck would have it, there was a patch posted that included doco.. Very worth reading... Cant wait till this makes it into mainstream.

http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/63991/

Actually those "Ext4" data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn't an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.

Really?

Looks like there was a real problem with ext4 that had nothing to do with KDE.

Mike wonders why the kernel tries so hard, rather than just failing allocation requests when memory gets too tight.

Wait, what? Has Google seriously never heard of vm.overcommit_memory?

The standard way to remove setuid requirements from ping is to implement the capabilities API, which was finally done in 2.6.26 even though the basic idea goes back to the 2.1 kernel in 1998. A good intro is available from IBM.

For those who just want to know how to fix it, you need to apply this git commit to your kernel tree and then either recompile and reboot or apply the patch using ksplice.