ARM Linux And Russell King Interview

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..."

Comments

ARM linux?

[krog]

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!

Re:ARM linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:ARM linux?

[Error27]

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.

Re:ARM linux?

[jakmouw]

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.

please don't tack flamebait onto my story

[krog]

that's not what i'm about.

Re:please don't tack flamebait onto my story

[Zigg]

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

grain of salt

[johnjones]

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

Re:grain of salt

[dinivin]

(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

Re:grain of salt

[jakmouw]

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.

arm / garmin etrex venture

[vstanescu]

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..

Re:arm / garmin etrex venture

[ajlitt]

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.

The Future is Small

[TandyMasterControl]

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