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ARM Linux And Russell King Interview

Posted by michael on from the arming-the-kernel dept.

Jeremy Andrews writes: "Kerneltrap has posted the latest in-depth kernel hacker interview with Russell King, who originally ported Linux to ARM and continues to oversee ARM Linux development. Russell talks about ARM, the 2.4 kernel, the upcoming 2.5 kernel and much more..."

37 comments

  1. ARM linux? by krog · · Score: 2, Funny

    i used to hear a lot of talk about "booting" and "bootstrapping" linux... now it's moved all the way up to the arm! good work guys -- i look forward to installing it when it runs on a computer!

    --
    Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
    1. Re:ARM linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "People new to Linux do ask about the Linux and BSD people sharing code, but there are problems with this - mainly there are concerns over patents with the BSD license."

      erm, correct me if i'm wrong, but there's nothing that stops Linux people from taking code from the *BSDs.

      there is, however, something that stops *BSD people from taking code from Linux and putting it in their kernels - the GPL.

      *BSD people don't want kernels that can't run without GPL code.

      Linux people can always take *BSD code and smack a GPL on top of the BSD license.

      seems to me like Russell King has misunderstood something.

    2. Re:ARM linux? by gregorio · · Score: 0

      GNU/Don't GNU/you GNU/mean GNU/booting Stallman/^H^HGNU/Linux?

    3. Re:ARM linux? by Error27 · · Score: 2

      I'm fairly sure that he knows what he is talking about.

      They were discussing this week ago on the lkml but www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/ is down right now so I can't find the link.

      It was in a thread about module_licenses.

    4. Re:ARM linux? by jakmouw · · Score: 2, Informative

      You misunderstood something. The GPL protects you against patent claims, the BSD license doesn't.

      If you take some BSD code and GPL it, you must be pretty damn sure that it's not patented code. Not many people want to take that bet.

  2. please don't tack flamebait onto my story by krog · · Score: 1

    that's not what i'm about.

    --
    Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
    1. Re:please don't tack flamebait onto my story by Zigg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      He didn't tack flamebait onto your story. He's 100% correct.

  3. grain of salt by johnjones · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    when anyone speaks to mr King you have to take it with a grain of salt

    banned compaq research lab from posting any kernel patchs for Ipaq to him

    will not upgrade his gcc so makefiles from kbuild wont work

    and lots of other little things

    personally I have liked the work done by NP on the ARM linux kernel

    regards

    john jones

    1. Re:grain of salt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm sorry you feel that way, but you might care to get some facts straight before spreading untruths.

      First:

      rmk@flint:[rmk]: gcc -v
      Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/armv4l-rmk-linux/2.96/specs
      gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-80)

      Second:View the patch system on the website, and you will find patches from Jamey Hicks in there.

    2. Re:grain of salt by dinivin · · Score: 1
      (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)

      del ta'ic or del'tic adj.

      • Word History: A Greek letter sits at the mouth of many rivers. Noticing the resemblance between the island formed by sediment at the mouth of a river such as the Nile and the triangular shape of their letter delta, the Greeks gave the name delta to such an island. English borrowed this sense from Greek, although the word delta appeared first in English as the name of the letter, in a work written possibly around 1200. The sense ?alluvial deposit? is not recorded until 1555, when delta is used with reference to the Nile River delta.


      So what does a river delta have to do with your bad spelling?

      Dinivin
    3. Re:grain of salt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I dono but you can find a picture of a deltic at this URL.

    4. Re:grain of salt by jakmouw · · Score: 1

      You should get your facts right.

      Compaq Research Labs is not and never was banned from posting patches to him. If you look at rmk's latest patches you will see that he merged quite some Ipaq specific stuff.

      I know what you're talking about: a year ago there was a flamewar going on about the SA1100 serial drivers between Russell and Compaq's George France. Both are pretty strong characters, and at a certain point Russell posted that he would put CRL in his personal killfile. At that point I stepped in and stopped the flamewar.

      The serial driver stuff is pretty much resolved right now, it even had a positive ending: the serial drivers in linux-2.5 will almost certainly be based on the ideas that arose after this accident.

      Your gcc remark is also not true. If you look up the "possible compiler bug" thread in the linux-arm mailing list archive, you can read that he uses Red Hat's gcc-2.96-80 to compile kernels.

      I'm glad you like Nicolas Pitre's work, but as you might now Nico only maintains the SA-11x0 port (and works on the XScale). Russell maintains the complete ARM Linux tree, so as you can see Russell and Nico have to work pretty close together. They also pretty much agree on the linux-arm* mailing lists

      The good news for you is that Russell integrated quite a large amount of Nico's patch in his latest kernels. See rmk's changelog.

    5. Re:grain of salt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He's also an asshole. If you watch the arm-linux mailing lists, he basically flames anyone who asks any questions and calls them stupid for not knowing the answer ahead of time.

  4. I wonder... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    when Mr. Torvalds and Mr. Cox will do something like this:

    shoeboy% man cvs

    1. Re:I wonder... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ok, a basic lesson in human nature.

      1. Humans are naturally selfish beings. They lust after things. Humans behind corporations (henceforth termed "suits") lust after money, some lust after power alone (henceforth named "some Free Sofware developers").

      2. The suits use patents and obscure rights claims to increase their income, thus satisfying their lust for money.

      3. Some Free Software developers elevate themselves to God-like status and make it hard for them to be replaced, thus satisfying their lust for power.

      4. To obtain patents and obscure rights, suits pay big money to governments.

      5. To make it hard for them to be replaced, some Free Software developers avoid use of modern tools which allow a more democratic development method.

      Linus himself is no better than Billy G (Linus wrote a terminal emulator, and ended up ruling a community; Billy bought Quick'n'DirtyOS, and ended up ruling a community).

      Here endeth the sermon.

      P.S. I am rather confused by the Slashdot moderation system. Is (Score: -1, Flamebait) an indication that a moderator has disagreed with the article, or does "-1" mean TRUE, as it used to mean on Acorn BBC Basic (which is, after all, the topic of this thread) ?

  5. arm / garmin etrex venture by vstanescu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anybody ever tried to disassemble the OS of a garmin etrex gps ? (afaik, they are strongarm). If yes, i would appreciate some hints for doing this..

    1. Re:arm / garmin etrex venture by ajlitt · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's a Cirrus EP7212 (I think, may be a 7312). Anyway, 74MHz ARM720T, memory controller, dual RS232 UART, dual audio CODEC interfaces, LCD, RTC, serial bootstrap (all you need to do the initial flash load is access to the UART0 RS232), and power management. Linux runs on these, as well as a bunch of other RTOSes.

  6. BSD patents? by ozzmosis · · Score: 0

    > Russell King: There has been the odd occasion when I've taken a peek to see where they are, and whether the BSD people are still doing ARM stuff. People new to Linux do ask about the Linux and BSD people sharing code, but there are problems with this - mainly there are concerns over patents with the BSD license.

    What patent problems are still in the BSD source tree's?

  7. The Future is Small by TandyMasterControl · · Score: 1

    Seems to me that ARM could be many times more important to Linux and its future success than the 64 bit iCantium arch, which is a wheezing mess, or Alpha which is now tragically disappearing beneath the scaly folds of the beast that hatched iCantium, (Hello ? FTC ? Travis Bickle where are you when we need you!) but you hear so little about ARM.

    Maybe kernel hackers could recalibrate their ideas of what's glamorous to work on and enduser Linux might tale off, thereby securing the future of Linux server side...

    My .02 USD

    --
    Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
  8. Preemptible ARM kernel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I am glad Russel is (sort of) open to a preemptible kernel on ARM because I am fairly certain Robert Love and MontaVista are working on one. Robert has said they plan to support all architectures but I think they are specifically working on ARM right now. Hopefully we will see that soon.

    Give credit where it is due: the preemptible patch is amazing.