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No confusion here. DTrace is useful for both profiling and tracing. More details here

The board meeting minutes were published on lwn.net more than three days ago.

Well, ftrace has a lockless ring buffer. And eventually all the ring buffers are going to be unified...

Seriously, this is the best opinion piece on open source and patents that I've read in a long long time. And as the founder and former director of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign and author of the FOSS Patents blog, I read (and write) a lot about that subject.

There's a precedent to this settlement in which Red Hat definitely paid royalties: when it settled the FireStar case. It published a misleading FAQ on its website trying desperately to divert attention from what really happened. The non-confidential part of that settlement was published and leaves no doubt that Red Hat entered into an obligation to pay (even Groklie arrived at that conclusion, a website that I very rarely agree with). That payment was probably not on a per-unit basis. They might have made a one-off payment, or a royalty on revenues/profits, or some combination of both.

Concerning Moglen's discouraging anti-software-patent lobbying, it's interesting that he gets away with it (other than Bruce Perens criticizing him for it now) while I get bashed all the time for calling on people to be pragmatic. The first time I met Eben Moglen (back in 2004 together with a MySQL VP), he told us not to lobby against software patents. Instead he wanted money for his patent-busting efforts, which failed miserably (Microsoft's FAT patents are still in force).

I tried very hard to fight against software patents (in the EU) at the legislative level. I said on my new blog several times that at some point (more than four years ago, in fact) I couldn't help but arrive at the conclusion that it's impossible. It won't happen simply because the collateral damage caused to other industries is huge (you either have to do away with the largest part of the patent system, or you have to live with software patents) and there simply isn't any serious, meaningful support for the anti-software-patent cause by businesses. On LWN I gave an example by quoting what a staffer of the conservative group in the European Parliament once said: unless you bring in those middle-aged closed-source entrepreneurs with beards, bellies and glasses talking about how they suffer from software patents and how they may have to lay off employees because of software patents, there's no way that a political majority will do what the FOSS community asks for.

While my focus is on how to deal with the most important threat (exclusionary strategic use of software patents), Moglen never talks about that because he's been loyal to IBM throughout his professional life and gets funded by them. Instead, he always talks about IBM's (and consequently, his) favorite bogeyman, which is the wrong focus.

Wrong.

Android isn't a subset of the Java environment. And Google hasn't accepted any Java license agreement.

The java license agreements are for
* the implementers of Java environments (which Microsoft agreed, broke, got punished for, etc). Google provide a complete alternative tool stack and hasn't agreed to this agreement

* the users of the SDK, which prevents (in section D of the SUPPLEMENTAL LICENSE TERMS) the user from altering elements under the java[x], sun, etc packages. http://java.sun.com/javase/6/jdk-6u2-license.txt Google hasn't accepted this user agreement either. The developer may have.

Oracle cannot control what Google does with code written in Java that doesn't target the official Java platforms. The language isn't copyrighted (nor copyrightable - http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=478), and except if they have specific patents in the conversion mechanism (which for example Gemalto is suing Google for - http://lwn.net/Articles/411852/), or in the implementation techniques used by the Java SE platform (which Google refutes) then Oracle should probably will lose (IANAL)

Chromium's browser process can't modify files or registry. It has the same feature IE likes to call Protected Mode. Chromium's XP impl emulates PM with restricted access tokens. Chromium on Linux is a little different; it's described over at LWN.

When people talk about android, android isn't really an OS- it's more like Gnome or KDE with a basic permission system hacked on (and a totally Android only API).

Not quite - Android also includes a set of kernel patches.

Well from the pages I've read from both sides that ain't really so much of what the stink is about. from what I've read there is a dozen or so guys that regularly give their time and code to BfW, and one guy went to one of the other main guys and asked permission to do an iPhone port. They didn't bother to ask any of the other guys and the one he asked didn't even bother to read the Apple EULA before saying yes.

So the other guys don't actually hear about ANY of this until nearly 8 months after the first made the port when it suddenly shows up for $5 on the app store which BTW the other guys ain't seeing a penny of and nobody even asked them anything. Considering they put in considerable code, time, and effort on this project with the understanding their works would be free for all, I can see one deciding to "take it in another direction" and re-licensing under a different license more than a little bit sorry, and probably illegal. This isn't so much about the GPL as these guys agreed to work without salary under certain terms and those terms were violated.

I think the scarier thing about this is how more and more will more likely be using "weasel contracts" where to contribute you have to sign away your rights, then they can release an "app version" without anyone being able to say anything. Whether you are for it or not Steve had made it clear that the future of Apple, from OSX to iOS, is a strictly "walled garden" approach, and it is kinda hard for the GPL to have any meaning at all if they can just take away the four freedoms at will. Hell you read the Apple EULA it seems to be written to make sure you can't have the four freedoms without permission, which kinda kills the point of GPL at all, might as well go BSD in that case.

I hate to break the news to you friend but BfW basically did an end run around the GPL by having the main developers license to Apple under different restrictions. There is still some stink over this since not all the contributors agreed. you can read more here but I would say since the FSF wrote the GPL if they say it ain't compatible then it ain't, period. Considering the whole basis of the GPL is the four freedoms, which you simply can't have because Apple uses both hardware and legalese to restrict what you can do with the code, I just don't see the two coming to any real agreement.

Either you have to own ALL the code so you can re-license it in a more restricted form as MYSQL used to do, or you simply can't play in Steve's garden. Personally I don't care for the walled garden approach but if that is your thing, enjoy. But logical hoop jumping won't make a walled garden into a free commons, nor will it make an Apple iDevice compatible with the four freedoms.

Assuming your SSD is detected correctly, the Linux block layer maintainer is proposing changes to improve SSD performance. The idea of waiting for requests (so as to be able to reorder them in a ladder fashion) is not used on SSD devices since 2.6.28 though.

what you need is http://code.google.com/p/pagecache-mangagement/ This tool allows the user to limit the amount of pagecache used by applications under Linux. This is similar to nice, ionice etc. in that it usually doesn't make an application go faster, but does reduce the impact of the application on other applications performance. This is especially useful for applications that walk sequentially through data sets larger than memory, as discarding their pagecache does not reduce their performance (although this tool does add overhead of about 2%). See http://lwn.net/Articles/224653/ Although it is little more than a proof-of-concept it seems to be fairly useful. When running pagecache-management.sh dd if=100-mb-file of=foo or pagecache-management.sh cp -a /usr/src/linux-2.6.20 /usr/src/foo

Finally the last few hardware manufactures have joint the Linux game. Like the wifi-drivers by Broadcom ( http://lwn.net/Articles/404248/ ) and the last printer-manufacturer also finally released something (I think it was brother).

My accountant demands that I use quickbooks. :(

The ledger part isn't the problem though. It's the legal (tax) mire and the proprietary file formats.

Useful article: http://lwn.net/Articles/314577/

Unfortunately, although Linus Torvalds is an excellent leader of technology development, he sometimes exhibits unsophisticated social behavior.

In the linked message from Linus, *YOU* are full of bullshit, he gives good reasons why he doesn't like C++, but he does not fully analyze the entire situation.

For example, he says "C++ leads to really really bad design choices". That's true in many cases, but C++ programming could be limited to the features that work well. Many of the problems with C++ are caused by programmers using features that they don't fully understand, only so they can get some experience using them. Often, it seems, programmers just want to experiment, and don't care about the long-term end result of what they are coding.

Another problem with C++ is that, while Bjarne Stroustrop was a good leader when C++ was introduced, he has basically exercised too little power in the last 20 years in making sure the C++ language and libraries developed rapidly enough, and in the correct direction.

Still, as bad as the situation is with C++, what is better? Java and C# are easily decompiled; both suffer from ugly politics. C++ is better than C in that it helps programmers control the scope of variables, for example.

When Linus Torvalds says "*YOU* are full of bullshit", he is acting out his anger, he is not acting like a leader. He is not helping make the situation better.

Unfortunately, the people on whom we rely to be our leaders are not always good leaders. We can, however, be thankful for everything positive they have done for us.

Look on the bright side, C++ keeps dilettantes and fudge-packing quiche eaters away from serious projects.

From what I know of their development practices, they really need something like git (Linus, himself, agrees). But who's going to tell Balmer that they're switching to software written by arch-enemy Linus Torvaldes? You might think they'd prefer that (we're using your free software, faggots!), but chances are VSS 2011 will contain some sort of half-assed distributed RCS support.

From http://lwn.net/Articles/403903/ :

Microsoft's CodePlex.com has announced the donation of $25,000 to support the development of the Mercurial source code management system.

Looks like they've found what they're looking for.

Where is the place that is now what slashdot was?

That would be LWN.

Quoting Michael Meeks from (paywalled for 10 days) http://lwn.net/Articles/407339/

The OpenOffice.org code-base that LibreOffice is derived from is licensed under the LGPLv3 - which gives us all a strong explicit patent license, and a good copyright license, so no. Clearly for new code we would want a plus ["or any later version"] license, so we are considering recommending a LGPLv3+ / MPL combination for entirely new code.

Really. QNX is many, many years BEHIND Linux right now.

Yeah, they have a microkernel with hard-realtime support and good maximum latency (which Linux can't match just yet).

However, if you look closely - it's not so great. Unix subsytem, filesystem and network stack all run inside one big process. So if it crashes it's almost as bad as kernel crash in Linux.

QNX's support for massive SMP (more than 8-16 CPUs) is bad, its scheduler is not quite good enough.

Various elements of QNX stack are hindered by microkernel approach as well. For example, you can forget about things like receive packet steering ( http://lwn.net/Articles/362339/ ).

QNX's support for 'transparent distributed processing' is just a joke. It's not usable in practice at all, because of overhead of message passing (which is usually assumed by applications to be extremely cheap).

With kernel modesetting, it is possible to run an accelerated X without root privileges (MeeGo does this) but currently there are safety caveats. To support multiple simultaneous users there is a need for a revoke syscall otherwise other users could snoop your input devices by not dropping previous access to devices (you can watch some X devs discussing the issue on Phoronix).

"Fine tuning" could be anything from tweaking some compiler settings to actually patching things in the kernel.

They patched quite a few things, but at the same time thought it important to be as close to mainline as possible. Here's the lowdown from Chris Mason over at LWN:

Hi everyone,

One of the goals of this kernel was to stay as close to 2.6.32.stable as we could. The sources are here in git, they won't be rebased:

http://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=linux-2.6-unbreakable.git;a=...
git://oss.oracle.com/git/linux-2.6-unbreakable.git
The main differences from mainline:

*) semtimedop optimizations. I posted these to the list a while ago, and Manfred took things in a less complex direction. He was waiting for me to fully benchmark the less complex version, but we ran out of time in the release cycle and had to focus on other things. Oracle hammers on the IPC lock, so these made a big difference, and now I finally have time to properly benchmark his approach against mine.

*) Ocfs2
*) Small lock contention fixes
*) Receive packet steering
*) A large update to RDS (this is in a different package)
*) A patch to list msi irqs for each device in sysfs. A modified irqbalance uses this to keep irqs on numa local cpus.

There are other bits and pieces, but we resisted the urge to pile things in.

The solid state disk access number came on a huge machine, and the improvements came from getting rid a lock in the driver and enabling it for softirq affinity code without taking any of the request locks.

Over the next 12 months we'll be getting an update prepared to a new mainline version, and trying to hammer on upstream kernels as much as we can to reduce our patch count even more.

-chris

Definitely. Best place to follow a lot of the debate is LWN. See this article for starters on some of the numbers that prompt the criticism. Canonical also has developed a reputation for maintaining large patches or groups of patches for applications rather than pushing the stuff upstream. Or they fork and create a new upstream.

These are just some of the arguments I can recall popping up on LWN the last few months -- I'm sure you can find more.

Of course, the usual suspects are at work here too... jealousy for sure as the technical heavy lifting of Canonical is done by Debian, Red Hat and others who employ the kernel hackers and such. Without these folks, Ubuntu wouldn't even exist...

Anyways, not to say Ubuntu doesn't give back in their own way, but these are the meat of the technical criticisms.

Here - I'll provide a bit of his evidence for you: Merry Christmas (just remember that it's not on a silver platter - you're going to have to know how to use strings, and do some research yourself).

The only thing that really matters to your business is whether it will make or lose money by open sourcing drivers. It seems that Broadcom was forced into open sourcing its drivers by the OEMs (Dell, HP, etc) who in turn were required to use FOSS drivers by some of their large customers requiring this for better Linux support. See http://lwn.net/Articles/404376/

If your company is going to lose money through not open sourcing drivers, the decision is obvious and the other issues can be resolved to make this happen.

http://lwn.net/Articles/396535/

July 21, 2010

Wesnoth struggles with App Store's GPL incompatibilities

You need to be able to recover from a crash anyway, so why write both: infrequently used but critical crash recovery and frequently used, but not always run clean shutdown? Just crash. Crash-only software: More than meets the eye

No, the grandparent means uninterruptible sleep.

Processes sleep in a way that can't be interrupted in some cases. For instance, when writing to a file. The logic of that that if it was possible, the application would have to retry the interrupted call, and since a write is assumed to be uninterruptible nobody tries to check if it was interrupted.

This ocassionally creates problems, like when something in the disk subsystem goes wonky, and a write call never returns, leaving the process sleeping and unkillable forever.

There was a patch to create a killable state, that allows fatal signals to be processed in such cases, since the process would die immediately anyway. I'm not sure how fully is this integrated, but while I remember unkillable processes in the past, I don't think I had any in the last couple of years.

Cedilla was baaaad!

Php became the #1 web server language in 2002 - and that hasn't changed since, and isn't likely to. Most web sites don't use jsp/struts/spring/jsf

We call it a LAMP (or WAMP) stack for a reason.

Microsoft's strategic interests are Windows and Office. Those two cash cows [...]

That reaffirms rather than contradicts what I said: interest in developer support. At least for Windows that's definitely key. So I can see their strategic interest in Mono.

I wish you would stop out spouting that nonsense about TurboHercules. IBM never attacked the open source project Hercules. Let's get that clear from the outset. They *do* have licensing requirements for Z/OS [...] This is no different than Apple's position with MacOS X on their hardware and the licensing position they take.

Anyone interested in the facts can go to this detailed discussion on LWN and search for occurrences of TurboHercules on that page, debunking all of what you just said and a lot more.

Exactly:

Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 22:23:38 -0700 (MST)
From: Richard Stallman
To: ben@algroup.co.uk
Subject: Re: [open-source] [Fwd: [icecast-dev] Xiph.org announces Vorbis Beta 4 and the Xiph.org

The GPL is not an end in itself; it is a measure to protect our
freedom. In general I would rather see software copylefted, which is
one way of defending users' freedom against one particular danger. In
the case of Ogg/Vorbis, there is a bigger danger from another
direction: the danger that people will settle on MP3 format even
though it is patented, and we won't be *allowed* to write free
encoders for the most popular format.

To overcome the inertia that supports MP3 format will require
strenuous effort. Even if we do our utmost to encourage everyone to
replace MP3 format with Ogg/Vorbis format, it is not certain they will
do so. Consider how long we have been trying to replace GIF with PNG.

Ordinarily, if someone decides not to use a copylefted program because
the license doesn't please him, that's his loss not ours. But if he
rejects the Ogg/Vorbis code because of the license, and uses MP3
instead, then the problem rebounds on us--because his continued use of
MP3 may help MP3 to become and stay entrenched.

Thus, my agreement with the idea of a lax license in this special case
is just as pragmatic as my preference for the GPL in most cases. In
both cases it is a matter of how we can attain freedom.

http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

Yep.

On Linux input devices are now moved into the kernel. The only complex thing remaining is modesetting and hardware acceleration. But they are being fixed as well.

In fact, you can run 'rootless X' on Fedora ( http://lwn.net/Articles/341033/ ) and soon on Ubuntu ( https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-maverick-rootless-x ). Here 'rootless' means that the server doesn't require root privileges to work.

The Linux kernel uses something called kernel shared memory (KSM) to achieve this with it's virtualization technology. LWN has a great article on it:

http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/

I cannot figure out why the headline says that the EFF won this case.

As I'm sure Bradley and the rest of y'all are well aware, sometimes Slashdot messes up some of the small, important details in articles.

I mean, that's the price we pay for our News for Nerds. At a more reputable news source like LWN, for example, we wouldn't see any kind of....oh wait, they screwed-up, too. :-)

Hmm, maybe the SFLC and the Conservancy just need some more (geek) exposure so that people know who they are. What do people think about some kind of trivia game in which people have to identify a group by its initialization, and then describe what they do?

We've got:
ASF
CC
EFF
FSF
FSFE
ISC
LF
OMNow
OSI
PSF
SFC
SFLC
SPI ... and so forth

Which unfortunately would require a complete re-design of the CPU hardware ;)

Hell, your cpu doesnt even work directly on "system ram", it all goes through various buffers (L1-L3 cache etc).

For a very nice article on how the architecture works: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/

Sounds like a lot of your wishlist won't be implemented any time soon:

1. You may be able to do some of that using cpusets and cgroups.
2. Yeah that is a pity. Some speculate that such a feature will not appear until the ptrace syscall is replaced.
3. Proportional I/O control might happen eventually (beyond what ionice offers for disks today).
4. Another good point. Apparently this can't be (easily) done today unless you can afford to miss wakeup events (in which case you could use futex_fd).

Sounds like a lot of your wishlist won't be implemented any time soon:

1. You may be able to do some of that using cpusets and cgroups.
2. Yeah that is a pity. Some speculate that such a feature will not appear until the ptrace syscall is replaced.
3. Proportional I/O control might happen eventually (beyond what ionice offers for disks today).
4. Another good point. Apparently this can't be (easily) done today unless you can afford to miss wakeup events (in which case you could use futex_fd).

Presumably he meant the issue described here: http://lwn.net/Articles/393144/

From reading the mailing list thread, my impression was that it was a storm in a teacup, and the real problem was just a simple bug rather than a fundamental misdesign. Or if you want to be slightly less charitable, a case of "concern trolling".

Who wrote 2.6.20? (Feb 2007)

The Linux Foundation details who contributes to Linux development

Besides, I've run into some pretty big egos in the corporate IT world over the past 22 years, some of them well-justified (IMO), and I've also known more than a few open source contributors who were simply fixing issues or scratching itches and who don't care about getting credit. The end goal was to write, fix, or improve something they're using.

Pieces of software are tools. Some folks just like sharpening tools. :-)

Care to share some links? From what I gather they are under no obligation from the GPL/GPLv2 to share kernel code they are running on internal servers, and they do share the kernel code (and hence comply) that is distributed in their app server products.

Source: http://lwn.net/Articles/357658/

Surely they have a better reputation for collaboration than China, no?

I refer you to "Interesting times for Linux Flash support" at http://lwn.net/Articles/389266/. I don't know why more (any) LWN articles aren't linked to from Slashdot.

Well, POSIX requires CHAR_BIT to be 8, so if you change that it's normal if it breaks.
But otherwise to test portability this seems interesting, although it would be most interesting if it could detect when something isn't done right.
Most importantly though, you'd need a compiler to target this architecture.
For instance, NULL being 0 is usually not part of the computer architecture itself; 0 is addressable on x86, causing this bug:
http://lwn.net/Articles/341773/

+1

That pretty much sums up why I subscribe to LWN, even though it's all free if you wait a week. It's a specialist site, that does its job very well, and that's worth rewarding.

Now, a site that is yet another regurgitation of the AP feed? No. I'll just go to another.

And things like what Murdoch came up with (apparently the interface is akin to a PDF, without copy paste or links)? They'd have to pay me to put up with that.

New article here on _Next3: Ext3 with snapshots_ http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Next3-Ext3-with-snapshots-1020107.html on adding snapshots to EXT3 file systems.

More is here too: http://lwn.net/Articles/387231/

Perhaps the best article is on sourceforge - http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/next3/index.php?title=FAQ#Is_Next3_related_to_Ext3cow.3F

The reason why open source doesn't make much money is because it's essentially a volunteer effort. The vast majority of people that do FOSS work do it unpaid, and on their own time.

Not really. If you look at major open source projects - Linux kernel, OpenOffice, Firefox, Chrome, etc., then the majority of coders are in fact employed and paid. If you look at all open source projects - including tiny one-man projects on sourceforge/google code - then sure, most of that work is hobbyist. But of the code actually being used by lots of people, most development effort is funded these days. Which is a sign of maturity in FOSS. (Not that volunteer efforts are not important - they remain crucial.)

For example, look here.

Linus said repeatedly that filesystem dumps are bad for reasons he is obviously not qualified to evaluate, but people believed him, and ext3 has no real support for dumps for NO GOOD REASON.

http://lwn.net/2001/0503/a/lt-dump.php3

There should be a Godwin's Law against quoting Linus in an argument.

What pem said. The original summary above is full of hyperbole and epic levels of FUD. A thread on a mailing list elevated to the status of News. Sheesh. Slashdot editors, please use some discretion.

For those Slashdotters who want the executive summary, go read the LWN thread from 4 days ago: http://lwn.net/Articles/388883/

I second that. What happened to "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."?

In that case it's true, and even Stallman recognizes the value of non-copyleft licenses in those cases.

I'm not posting using a BSD licensed browser, though.

Whoops. Wrong article. Here you go: http://lwn.net/Articles/389611/

What pem said. The original summary above is full of hyperbole and epic levels of FUD. A thread on a mailing list elevated to the status of News. Sheesh. Slashdot editors, please use some discretion.

For those Slashdotters who want the executive summary, go read the LWN thread from 4 days ago: http://lwn.net/Articles/388883/