Red Hat's Michael Tiemann On gcc, ReiserFS & More

Mayank points to this interview at FreeOS.com with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann, in which Tiemann discusses why the Hat shipped a development kernel with their 7.0 distribution, journaling filesystems, the openness of ecos, and the competition (no, not that competition). It's a good read, though it would be cool to see the same questions addressed at even greater length. Guess everyone has a time limit, though;) [Updated by timothy:] I flubbed, that should read "development snapshot of gcc," of course, not "development kernel." Stop hitting me.

Comments

That makes complete sense, in context

[miniver]

The embedded marketplace is very different from your typical computer/os/software/hardware market. In the embedded market, the developer typically ends up hard-linking his application into the OS, since both pieces are going to be jammed into the same EPROM (or Flash if you've got the budget). To save space, often the developer will decide which OS services he needs, and discard the rest (ie: if you're not building a network appliance, why load the ethernet drivers?) An embedded OS is really more like a development framework -- it gives your application the tools it needs to function without the programmer having to implement those tools from scratch.

If you attempt to GPL the kernel to an embedded OS, then you're going to force developers to release all of their source code, simply because they linked their code with the OS. If you put this restriction on an embedded OS, then no embedded developers will buy your OS, no matter how good it is. On the other hand, either LGPL or MPL can be commercially viable, while still encouraging developers to contribute.

Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,

And what I don't like (Was Re:What I don't like)

[Kostya]

• Red Hat is making arbitrary decisions regarding what beta/development features to include in their distributions, and what to leave out.

You have got to be kidding me. You are taking issue with what features they choose to include and exclude? That is the WHOLE POINT of distributions! They have features. They differ in what they offer. The distributions have been that way for 3 years now. What, can't a company decide what features their OWN product has to offer? Remember, those RPMs don't compile themselves.

• Red Hat has always been progressive. I just wish they were a little more attentive to the needs of their customers.

What the heck are you talking about? Have you even used RedHat 7.0? 7.0 has USB support. Who else has USB support? RH7 has X4. Who else (before 7) has X4? It has improved security packages and more manageable setups for servers and workstations--things users have been demanding. So how exactly are they ignoring customers?

As for the other things they should have included: they HAVE 2.4 kernel RPMS. I ask again, have you even looked at RH7? I installed the RPMS and gave them a whirl. So what distrib are you using? ReiserFS is not in the distrib, but can easily be added to RedHat.

I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you appear to have no idea what you are talking about. Have you even used the distribution? If not, why do you feel the need to make a whole lot of noise when you don't have your facts straight?

I am soooo sick and tired of all the baseless Red Hat bashing that takes place on Slashdot. It is not Slashdot (the website) itself, but the hoards of people who want their 15 seconds of fame for having "gave it to the man" in a post. Slashdot is supposed to be a place where we discuss things and offer something of value. Just spouting stuff at random does no one any good.

Plus you end up looking silly.

Re:competitor ?

[Tet]

I couldn't say that MS is a competitor anyway... RH is tiny in comparisson to MS.

MS is a major competitor to Red Hat in the server market, which I'd guess is where RH get most of their income anyway. The fact that MS have 95% of the desktop market, and that they have 100 times the market capitalisation doesn't matter. Linux and Windows have approximately equal sized shares of the server market, and RH wants to increase the size of their share. Of course MS is a competitor.

Re:what other distributions?

[Ed Avis]

Use a development snapshot of gcc, so that C++ programs compiled on RH7 only work on RH7.

Boo hoo. So the C++ ABI has changed from one version of gcc to another - so what? It wasn't a fixed standard in the first place. If you are relying on implementation-defined details like this you will surely get bitten sooner or later.

Again change their RPM binary format (for the utterly stupid reason that it now supports bzip2 compression), so RH7 RPMs only work on RH7.

Just get RPM 3.0.5 which is forwards-compatible with 4.0.

Use a glibc2.2 development snapshot, so that again, their RPMs only work on RH7.

Red Hat have upgraded the C library in the past, what's so wrong with doing it this time? Surely you don't advocate that we should all still be on libc4 in order to keep binary compatibility?

Re:almighty buck

[Throw Away Account]

The fact that capitalism happens to work well in practice, while communism doesn't, is just the small issue of human nature

Not true. Socialists like to claim the problem is human immorality, but the real problem is in information theory. A race of angels could not get socialism to work, because the necessary information on where resources should be allocated is not generated by any known form of non-free-market economic system.

Now, if you have perfect information available, things change. Not only is socialism workable, it is far more efficient than the expensive feedback mechanism of the free market. Furthermore, with perfect information, you can bypass the "human nature" deficiencies by creating personal-incentive programs within the otherwise socialist system. Asimov described just such a situation in his short story "The Evitable Conflict", the last story in "I, Robot".

But we don't have perfect information. Nobody's even come up with an accounting mechanism for a socialist economy that produces enough information to make central planning as productive as a highly regulated mixed economy, much less a true free market. (And forget non-centralized socialism; the information deficit is enven worse.)

In short, in theory as well as practice, socialism doesn't work. The best that can be said for socialism is that most socialists have their heart in the right place.

what other distributions?

[Marcus Meissner]

Judging from that article, they no longer care about 'other' Linux distributions, but assume market leadership including all negative aspects of it, notably just forcing something down the users throat in their 'best interest'.

They no longer care about compatibility with other Linux distributions (LSB? Whats that?):

• Use a development snapshot of gcc, so that C++ programs compiled on RH7 only work on RH7.
• Again change their RPM binary format (for the utterly stupid reason that it now supports bzip2 compression), so RH7 RPMs only work on RH7.
• Use a glibc2.2 development snapshot, so that again, their RPMs only work on RH7.

All possibilities of 'choice' within Linux being wiped out by them I now nearly agree with the 'RedHat sucks' motto. *sigh*

Re:gcc snapshot, not development kernel

[MartinG]

actually, although you are correct that they shipped a development gcc, and that's what the article was meant to say, they DID ship a development kernel also. It's not installed by default obviously, but it's there for those that want it. Furthermore they also installed a (arguably) more stable compiler in the form of gcc 2.95.2 but it's only set up to be used for kernel compiles iirc.

Re:Interview

[LizardKing]

You're obviously clueless, but I'll bite. After all I am on my lunchbreak ...

Compare this with Windows, which has test periods of a year or more for new Windows releases.

Would you really trust your company to a distro that ships a broken compiler?

Read bugtraq, and learn just how stable and secure those tested versions of Windows are. Not very. As for a `broken' compiler, try Visual C++ 5.0 which was notoriously broken. RedHat's GCC snapshot was only `broken' in the respect that it was binary incompatble with preceding versions and the upcoming version 3.0. They had very good reasons to ship a snapshot, not the least of which was the fact that it produced better object code than 2.95.2. The alternative was to stick with egcs-1.1.2, which is getting exceptionally long in the tooth. If you really want to criticise a Linux distributor for shipping dodgy compilers, then turn your attention to Mandrake. They shipped the Pentium optimised `pgcc', which is known to produce incorrect assembler output.

> > [Why the broken compiler?]
This doesn't make an eachway-incompatible compiler a good idea. What it does say, however, (his words not mine) is that
(a) the current compiler is a POS
(b) we're using an incompatible, and immediately obsolete compiler.

Doesn't really encourage you to use Linux, rather than say, Windows, *bsd or Solaris, does it - the current compiler sucks

It wont encourage you unless you know how poor Microsoft or Sun's compilers are. As for BSD you clearly are clueless, as they use aging versions of gcc. Microsoft have yet to produce an ANSI C compliant compiler, let alone an ANSI C++ compliant one. As for Sun's compiler suite, they no longer ship it by default with Solaris, and many of the companies I have worked for use gcc instead out of preference. In other words, they have a Sunpro licence, but don't bother installing it.

These patches are indicative of the unstable state of Linux development ... (see Mandrake for a desktop product, not that it's a patch on Windows or Mac)

Let's see - my desktop machine has not crashed once since I installed RedHat 6.2 on it four months ago. It has all the tools that my colleague's Windows PC has, and more (ever tried grep'ing or find'ing on a PC?). In the same time the programmer to my immediate left has reinstalled Windows twice, and the Mac programmer is lucky if he get four hours of uptime.

As for your inference that Windows software is easier to use, try Visual C++ some time. Their is no source control as standard, and the API's are dreadful (dodgy socket libraries for example).
Chris

redhat 7.0 at my company

[IceFox]

I have been developing an application these past 6 months under redhat 6.2 and looked forward to 7.0.

Unfortunettly becuase of the way that everything is cvs quality / hacked / part this part that we have concluded that there is really no was for us to use redhat 7.0. From the kernal files being messed up, X3 and 4 kludged together, and a compiler that never would have seen a real box if it wasn't for redhat we have been virtually unable to get any sort of a build made. This does not mention the other issues we encountered.

Even though companies all "standerdize" on redhat I can say that we now don't.