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The 2.5 Kernel Tree And Alan Cox
Motor writes "It seems that (as everyone suspected), the 2.5 Linux kernel tree is close to opening. However, contrary to expectations, 2.4 will not be maintained by Alan Cox, but will instead be handled by Marcelo Tosatti. Thanks to Alan for all his hard work on 2.0 and 2.2."
Go read the linux-kernel mailing list archives; at least once every couple of months, someone tries to give Linus a 300K patch, and he rejects it. Linus wants *small* patches, which do specific things, or implement one new feature.
Essentially, the only reason NON-platform-specific stuff gets through faster is because it all goes to Alan Cox, who then stuffs them into his own tree (the -ac* patches). When he decides they're stable enough to pass on, he breaks them up into bite-sized pieces for Linus.
Is this partially do to his over-zealousness and/or fears concerning the DMCA?
It is a sad day, if US laws are scaring off foreign OSS coders.
Perhaps Alan just could not bring himself to maintain the stable 2.4 tree with the new 2.4 VM (Andrea), given his stated preference for the improved older 2.4 VM (Rik)?
I am not comfortable with someone in such a powerful and important position in the linux community using his position for his own personal agenda. I think he should have resigned back then, and am glad he has stepped down now.
Although I must make clear I do not like the DMCA, it is still clear to me that such a conflict of interest and abuse of a supposedly monarchal position above such political realities is very wrong indeed.
I'm actually quite concerned that the loss of Alan Cox will shift some of the balance in the kernel team. Alan has really done a great job for many years, and we need all sorts of different types of people doing different things in different ways in order to preserve the diversity that has really added a lot of value.
So, who are we going to get to replace Alan Cox? It seems to me that you're going to need Eric Allman or some type of person like that to fill the same roll as Alan has.
It sounds boring to me... Adding new features should be more engaging then fixing bugs and pleasing users.
Sig you!
Where's the new maintainer's weblog, so we can track how he's doing?
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Whilst not wishing to condone the generally apalling standard of English found on Slashdot (& that's just in my posts ;-) I think you may be a little confused.
Rules of correct use of English are not prescriptive. They are guidelines, helping to ensure one is understood. Bad English is difficult to understand English. Your point, sir, is mere nitpicking.
Respectfully,
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
Linux 2.4, maintenance and succession
Posted 2 Nov 2001 by alan
People will have been wondering about the 2.4 stable kernel progression. Various bizarre rumours in Byte seem to have generated a lot of discussion and rumour. Now that the people concerned are all agreed its time to put the entire roadmap out and make it clear.
Linus will be releasing a 2.4.14 and probably a 2.4.15 finishing off the VM stability work and other rough corners. At that point the 2.5 kernel tree will be opened. There is a lot stuff queued for 2.5. It isn't going to be possible or sensible to throw it all into 2.5.0. One of the tasks is to put changes together in the right order.
Marcelo Tosatti will be the head maintainer over the 2.4 stable kernel tree. This is not the giant change it may seem from the outside. The stable kernel management was and is a group effort. Marcelo and many others have been active in 2.2 and 2.4 stabilisation work. I'll be helping Marcelo with advice when he asks it, and working on feeding him the 2.4 relevant bits of the -ac tree.
I will not be dissappearing from the scene, although I might be a little less visible at times. There are various kernel projects I will be working on as well as spending more time concentrating on Red Hat customer related needs. I'm hopeful that spending more time closer to customers will help provide more insight into where 2.5 needs to be going.
David Weinehall did a great job on 2.0.39 when he took over 2.0 from me.I'm very confident that Marcelo will do a great job on 2.4.
Alan
Ah. My troll detector should have gone off, but unfortunetly, I didn't bother looking at your other posts until after hitting submit. For those of you who also thought a sub-100 UID wouldn't be trolling, read the following comment.
4 87 103
/. anyways.....
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23078&cid=2
You'll have to c&p 'cuz I'm lazy and long urls never work with
I welcome 2.5! I wish it would come sooner!
This whole VM and severe -ac branching which has occurred truly frightened me. If it persisted, it certainly would have resulted in a fork of sorts.
It seems that Alan has a good understanding of what a release kernel should have, and the types of changes that should occur in such a kernel. Introducing a new VM, as stated before on slushdot, in the middle/end of a stable kernel series, is plain silly.
Come to think of it, I kind of like the idea that Alan is NOT maintaing the stable kernel, for 2 reasons:
1. His talent would be best served on new development of the 2.5 kernel (hey, who doesn't like working on the cool new stuff).
2. In light of his anti-DMCA actions, it would seem that he has no issue with putting Linux up on the firing line to support his politically motivated beliefs. It doesn't matter if you agree with Alan on the DMCA or not, not posting changelog notes like he did was childish and counterproductive to the goal of Linux: world domination through collaboration.
- Tux
By saying you are "against the DCMA" you are by nature making a *political* statement. I say this because DCMA is a law and once you start to argure about laws being wrong your are in the domain of politics. Hell, just look at headlines recently on slashdot there's a nice big chunk that have to do with politics.
As, for the artical the author looks like he is fumming because as a US citizen he is being kept in the dark about "secret" kernel changes. The author then goes on to say "with his typical English resentment of the former colonies who have long since outstripped England in world influence". What has this got to do it anyway? Has ANYONE ever heard of Alan acting in this way? I doubt it, infact if Alan was german I can just imagine some Nazi comment in its place. I just stopped reading the article there since this guy is obviously out to slure Alan because he is being inconvienced by a *law* that is active in *his* country. I mean, remember all the non-US servers when we had crypto laws??
AC's has shown great skill in pulling together rapid/major changes. Clearly his help is needed with the 2.5 series more than 2.4. But there is also the part that people don't like to talk openly about which is: how much can other commerical GNU/Linux distributors claim that the offical kernel development is a puppet of Red hat?
:)
While AC has done a great job of judging the priorities of the Linux community as a whole over the priorities of Red hat, there is still the question of how much his employeement at RH effects him. Anotherwords, for example, Ext3/JBD is a kernel modification that Red hat is very much pushing. It now appears in all Red hat v7.2 kernels. Also, the Ext3/JBD modifications have appeared for a while in the AC patches. But if these modification started appearing in the 2.4 kernel, others might question if it is because it is truely ready to be in 2.4 or if Red hat is using their AC position to strong arm submittions. Clearly IBM and SGI would also like to see their file system additions in the vanilla 2.4 kernel series. Having to justify the addition of one over the other shouldn't have to be AC's job.
So, I believe Alan Cox is doing the best technical and *political* choice for the Linux community as a whole.
So Marcelo Tosatti is the new made man ? I thought the books were closed...
-Tony Soprano
Always has. Always will (I hope).
:). He also is a practical man in terms of software use. I.e. He still disputes Linus' edict that binary only kernel modules are alowed but at the same time he didn't force Telsa to switch to Linux right away. (She uses it now).
Most people don't know this but in the weekly kernel traphic he is usualy listed #1 in volume of messages. He also subscibes to and discuses important isues in many other places from slashdot.org to the kde-licensing mailing list.
BTW: Read his diary. That's how I found out that he is a GNU fundamentalist
Speaking of Telsa. Her site "The more accurate diary. Really." should be requird reading for anyone dateing a Linux geek with serius intentions towards that geek.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
If Anonymous Coward had a karma rating, how low would it go?
OTH, Linus continues assuming is Alan the responsible (Spanish too).
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
The ext3 stuff is scheduled for merging soon. The VM is simply more important, and as of 2.4.14pre7 basically works (there are a couple of corner cases left where it fails) - and is much faster than the older Riel VM. That was a concluded experiment anyway
RH doesn't get to decide what I feed to Linus,and Linus wouldn't listen if they did. XFS is 2.5 material certainly. JFS I don't know - Im watching it with great interest.
Alan
The DMCA has nothing to do with this btw - and I think given 6 months the US courts will have given the congress the required slap around the head with a wet herring. Until then it pays to be careful
All uncensored change logs are on
http://www.thefreeworld.net for non US citizens. US citizens take their own chances
You know your a geek when a post by Alan Cox is more exciting to you than say, meeting the President.
Andrew
I thought it was funny.
What about Joe Sixpack?
The slowdown was a copyright protection measure. You are in violation of the DMCA!
A tip for the Newbies, this is not the first time... Alan has left the project before, generally around the same time in the development cycle. I think Alan is really into the "Cutting edge" features, and once kernel development slows to the quibbling about minutae, as it has now, I really think it takes alot out of him.
Alan also seems to work on HIS kernel, and then let everybody use it. He never intended to be such a dominant voice, no matter how strong his opinions. I think when good technical discussions between he and Linus get publicized as being interminable rifts (which believe me they are not) he tends to step back, being the less media visible member and wanting to avoid the appearance of a disastrous controversy.
And quite frankly, how many of us work 6 months on our hobby and then take some time off?? I sure do...
Wait until the Kernel gets exciting again, AC'll be back.
~Hammy
nothing4sale.org
WindowsXP was crashing like a monkey driving a Pinto.
All I've read this far was Linus mentioning handing over the 2.4-tree to Alan, I've never heard Linus talk about handing 2.4-stuff over to other people. Last thing I read was that he said it was up to Alan which VM he'd use for 2.4 after he got it.
Anyone who's followed Alan Cox for a while would laugh at the notion that Alan could be a Red Hat puppet. The day he has a falling out with Red Hat, he'll instantly get a substantial amount of money from some other company. If anything, Alan's involvement in a company that has to support users makes him a better judge of many things than someone in Linus's more isolated position.
If Red Hat is pushing a particular technical direction for Linux, it's quite likely that the reason for the push is because of the expert opinions of the many kernel hackers that work for them as to which code is mature enough to support.
I want AC's message up there for all posterity. Maybe I will capture it and make it my root picture.
Infuriate left and right
Hey I agree with the Coward, and would like to say Welcome Back Hemo's!! I haven't seen you post anything to recently. I do wish I had more to say that was relevant to your article. -Asterax
Kernels with odd minor versions are experimental. We need to maintain a stable tree. And hopefully in 2.6.x devfs will be the de facto standard.
Commitment to the cause? That's certainly something Alan seems to have plenty of.
And there's fun and engagement in most aspects of life, if you are open to it.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Actually, the slowdown is a stupid locking bug I just haven't gotten around to fixing on the production server.
'Course that won't stop me from suing the perpetrator under the DMCA anyway, once I find out who he is.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
(Score:-1; Funny). Oh, that's good.
GPL is good and bad. Many times, when software is developed, there is the desired product, and then the offsprings of the product either to make the product easier to develop, or to improve performance.
Almost all large companies have subdivisions and many projects, and inevitably, a commitee is usually formed to take alot of this duplicate effort and condense and reuse it. See, code sharing is something that occurs at all levels and is a natural thing give the nature of programming.
Not everything should be GPL'd. Things that go through a QA process or things that have some kind of assurance of quality should not be GPL'd since the GPL releases the creator of any liability which would be counterproductive. Often times though, in the commerical sector, code is also provide with a product since that way the customer can modify it to suit their needs since most companies don't want to be bothered with custom features.
Your post seemed though-out although posting as an AC doesn't help your cause...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
2.4-AC stands for Alan Cox!!! And all this time I'd thought that it was a 2.4 kernel based on submissions from anonymous cowards...
Yes, Alan Rules! Put Linux realpolitik aside. Alan is an amazing asset to not only the Linux community, but to humanity itself. Alan is a fulcrum, a catalyst. His work benefits millions. This is not hyperbole, but fact.
Alan can do what he wants. And we should be so happy that he does. Anyone who thinks otherwise should take a vacation.
I apologize for riding the coattails of a high-ranking post, but I just had to gush.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Since you asked, and everyone else will want to know..
Here is some info on our new maintainer..
Marcelo works for Connectiva. He lives with "Rik". He looks like this.
His weblog is here.
His "homepage" area is here
And I gotta say.. impressive to get that level of responsibility at his age..
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
THIS
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Withholding the info regarding the security patches isn't cool in any way. If he wants a to make a political point about the DMCA then he should do so on his website. No allowing us to know if we need to upgrade our kernels is just petty childishness.
And another packet handler!!!!! You had fun learning a completely new firewall, from 2.0 to 2.2, and again from 2.2. to 2.4? Well, the fun never ends with the linux kernel! That's right, folks, get ready for (cue the drums)... packethole! (cue the 2001 theme music). Also, in a related story, the .plan file for 2.8 includes an even newer and completely different firewall tool, chunkywall. One can only wonder, if they can keep this streak going through the 3.x series.
*Note* I'm not a troll, really. I do love linux, and I'll even admit that iptables is much nicer than ipchains. But please.... let me catch up, for crying out loud. I guess it could be worse, microshit marketdriods could invade, and it would be renamed Kernel 2002. *barf*
You mean minutae like the VM puking when you run out of RAM?
If that's minutae than what does Linux consider to be a show stopper?
I think Alan did an excelent job maintaining 2.2. Now that he has officially left/declined the role of 2.4 maintainer, the question arrises to what/who is maintaining 2.2 (I am assumming Alan is looking to avoid all kernel maintenance for awhile)? My suspision is that it will soon "lay fallow" but I believe most distributions have not yet made the full leap to 2.4 yet. What I am curious about is how much longer will Alan maintain it? It would be ironic if 2.0.x had a maintainer but 2.2.x had none!
I miss the Karma Whores.
one happy looking fellow... the fact that he wont ever get laid got him down?
The VM is simply more important, and as of 2.4.14pre7 basically works (there are a couple of corner cases left where it fails) - and is much faster than the older Riel VM. That was a concluded experiment anyway
So the story linked to from a couple of days ago, about Linus accepting the entirely new VM code and you holding on to the old VM, is resolved, with no threat of a fork?
Give them a round of applause! (Okay, I watch BBC too much :-P )
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Offtopic? Whoever modded this down is trying to quiet critics. This isn't offtopic. It might be wrong (I'm not sure) but the moderator's motives were not pure.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Probably. Marcelo is 17, and where he lives (Brazil) you don't go to jail before 18.
And he uses Slackware at home.
Haha, I unencrypted your html encoded web page and posted the content to /. Mwhahahaha :)
why would someone want to maintain an old kernel?
It sounds boring to me... Adding new features should be more engaging then fixing bugs and pleasing users.
Ah, but you are forgetting that more people actually use the stable 2.4 kernel as part of many many distributions. Having the responsibility of maintaining this very important (and mission critical in many cases) kernel is right on par with making the next version. It's just a different kind of responsibility.
----- rL
What the hell does this have to do with anything?!? If you're going to write term papers online, do it somewhere else PLEASE.
im sorry, im new to slashdot, i don't know how to reply to the right topic =p
of extradition?
Besides, it's his changelog, he can do whatever he wants in it. If you don't like it, do the diff and post your own damn change log.
The DMCA was used in an absolutely absurd way to jail and prosecute Dmitry Skylarov. Why exactly would equally stupid things not happen in the future?
And besides, why is the only responsible thing to do to (possibly) break US law and then never again go to the united states. Why can't he just avoid breaking US law entirely, and leave himself the option of coming here and not being jailed?
Neither prison nor jail are pleasant. Neither is being tried for a crime. I wonder how you speak with such flippancy on these matters when it has be demonstrated the the current US legal system is not sane.
When you think about it, it's pretty scary how many things which are illegal but shouldn't be that people can be imprisoned for a long time.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
could happen.....
Moderation Totals: Redundant=1, Funny=5,Overrated=1, Total=7.
And slashcode still thinks it's redundant??
Is that something like a Marxist?
One thing we always have to remember in volunteer projects is that people come and go. The only respectful thing that can be done at times like this is to be supportive of our contributors' choices and let them pursue their own courses in life.
The Linux kernel is riding on more than enough popularity that it's not in any danger of failing to find new contributors. But for smaller Open Source projects, this kind of thing is why you'd want to always recruit new volunteers and try to build up a core of leaders in your projects. Then you're able to get through the inevitable times when volunteers need to take a break or go do something else.
The latest trick to increase your karma is to post the entire contents of the link in a comment
Still, I don't think the GPL is something we really have to worry about. GPL-based systems refute their own viability in practice -- you get an unreliable patchwork of confusing crap. As commercial systems (XP, Mac OS X..) continue to improve in quality , Linux (or GNU HURD if you prefer) is left further and further behind. Linux will never venture beyond the realm of computer hobbyists aka "geeks" because quality, documentation, user-interface, thorough programming, etc. all require money.
You can already see how much the Linux fad has died down just over the last few months (people have finally tried it and saw how much it sucks). It was the "pet rock" of the late 90s. The Linux fad is past its sell-by date and has begun rotting in the refrigerator.
1. I'm thinking of the "abolish intellectual property" crowd here.
Many companies revert to a "Mumble, Mumble" approach about the details of security holes and they try to quietly fix them. With Linux, we can all get to contribute to the kernel so we all need to know the dirt about problems and why they occurred.
This isn't just politics, this is very practical, do we want AC to join Dimitry, waiting to find out whether or not he will be prosecuted? Do we want Linux conferences in the US?
See my journal, I write things there
Maybe it is time for a write-in campain to elect AC president and maybe even get rid of all stupid crypto regs for good. :) Does revisionist history allow for declairing AC to be a naturally born citizen?
Haing a look at his picture there I saw a familiar face. I spoke to marcelo at Linux.conf.au - if he's the person I thought of, we had a gand old chat about Connectiva's porting of the APT software installation system to the RPM package manager. He's a good guy and quite approachable - I'm a system administrator, and although I have some coding skills (I know some ionterpreted languages and can read C, but that's about it right now) my experience with Linux is mainly as a user and maintainer rather than a developer. Marcelo (like AC, who I also met that trip) was a pleasant and approachable fellow, and it surprised me how both men were happy to converse with anyone without that occasional sense of elitism and self importance that one can get from...well, packet filtering maintainers :).
If you're not familiar with Marcelo Tosatti and feel that you want to "read up" on him. Here's a good way. Follow the link below and you'll find over a 1000 posts made by him in different linux mailing lists, particularly the kernel list. Marcelo Tosatti in the MARC archives
Shouldn't that be Alan Pussies?
Nobody's perfect.
Of Course, half the /. crowd will now start a campagn for Anonymous Coward for President.
;)
Actually, I think Alan would make a great president
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
IBM is a good example.
No, he would do well, I am sure. I think his skills are very marketable.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
>David Weinehall did a great job on 2.0.39 when
>he took over 2.0 from me.I'm very confident that
>Marcelo will do a great job on 2.4.
I am also very glad that someone from a "third world country" takes this reponsability, that shows that Linux is really an international effort and not only dominated by rich or developed countries. It's very nice to see also that a lot of hacking in Linux is occuring in Brasil, I hope other third world countries will follow. That's why free/open source software is so nice everybody has it's chance, this is another aspect of it.
Me, please, pick me, pick me, pick me please?
Huh?! He looks too old for this job. Couldn't they have picked someone under 30?! It takes great powers to harvest the energy of 50+ kernel developers.
Say again?
:)
He works for Conectiva and uses Slackware? How's that for supporting your employer
The dude, Marcelo I mean, looks normal. Not geekish at all.
"...the GPL releases the creator of any liability..."
And proprietary software licenses don't? Read a M$ EULA some time.
FOLK merges in the -ac stuff, much of the -aa stuff, LOTS of real-time code (RTHAL, RTSCHED, RTNET), scheduler plug-ins, much of SGI's debug code, JFS and XFS, support for compressed & buggy memory, software suspend, the VAX architecture, VME support, PPSCSI, ISCSI, CBM64 device support, support for assorted low-budget network controllers, COMEDI and all sorts of other wonderfully insane stuff.
More significantly, most of the "newer" features in the -ac code were in FOLK first - compressed ISO images, e3fs, PPC64 support, plug-in network protocols, etc.
This is not to say that Alan Cox is slack -- I didn't wait for stability before adding stuff into FOLK. What it =IS= saying is that the FOLK series is one of the most advanced Linux kernels out there. There are not many "custom" kernels out there with nearly the scope. (Although it has to be said that most of them beat FOLK hands-down on reliability.)
IMHO, we have all waited far too long for 2.5.0 to be released, and 2.4.x has proven to be too experimental, due to pressures to finish the 2.3.x development series too soon.
If nobody takes me up on my suggestion on using an existing custom kernel as a "2.5.0-wannabe", then at the very very least, ply Linus with virtual beer until he agrees to ensure that the REAL 2.5.0 is not hampered by being kept in sync with 2.4.x, but is the Dream Kernel.
Look, development is very easy. It's easy, because you can build on something that's there. But you can't so easily build on something that isn't. It's also easier to take components out than add them in.
The only logical conclusion is to stuff 2.5.0 silly, and see what survives.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Relinquished!? HAH HAH! You used a completely incorrect word just because you thoughtr it would make you look clever! *points and laughs* *throws poo* There is no such person as "Vlad Drac" by the way, even I know it was Patton, and I wouldn't exactly call the Secret Chiefs creative.
(Score:0; Troll). That's better.
EULA are not the same as a license that a commerical vendor uses for a commerical product.
Remember, most software development is not for the average user. Click-throughs don't mean anything because even if M$ did take responsibility, it wouldn't matter much.
It's the difference between HP-UX and Linux for example. If a company is using Linux and discovers that it is having packet-loss because of a kernel bug, they have to either a) fix it themselves or b) wait for a fix to get made. You better believe though that when a commerical user has a problem with HP-UX, there can be major problems for HP if HP doesn't fix it very quickly.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Yeah! Let's do away with that outdated "parliment" stuff in Great Britain and install Alan as president! About time they got rid of that royal family too....
There is no Linux monopoly.
If you don't like ac don't use his stuff.
vigilance is the only way we will keep these
evil maniacal maniacs from taking over the world.
This comment surprised me a bit as one of the main reasons i use and/or abuse linux is due to its stability. Windows supports everything, but its crap. So i think it is a great idea to continue to fix bugs and improve stability of the 2.4 kernel branch as in real world applications down time is bad... very bad, samba file servers or nat'ing gateway boxes dont _need_ support for usb keyboards or the ability to play dvds in X, they are given a task to serve and they do it. I think your view is aimed more towards the desktop environment and not the real world internetworking industry. The more stable the box running a particular service is, the less downtime there is... which leads to people like me and other admins being favourably looked upon, a VERY rare occasion these days ;] I for one am looking forward to kernel 2.4.2x or even 2.4.3x (who knows???) and the increased peace of mind I will have knowing that whatever solution I provide using an newer revision of the kernel, the less chance there is of a system crash or a loss of service. Basically, downtime is baaaaadddddd ummmkaaaayyyyyy!
- Sig