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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.
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
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 ?
Avoiding jail is not being polical!
You may have the opinion that anything Alan does as a kernel developer/maintainer is not affected by the DMCA and will not result in charges from some over zelous DA, but I seriously doubt there are any lawyers out there that would back you up. There have to be quite a few court rulings before anyone will even have a feel for this.
One of the reasons that everyone calls DMCA bad law is it's total lack of boundaries. This makes it unpredictable law, subject to abuse. While you and I may feel that there would be no justification to jail someone because they worked on CD/DVD drivers that someone else could use to run DECSS(?) is no guarantee for Alan or anyone else that someone won't arrest them and see what the courts say.
Avoiding being someone's legal guinea pig is not being political.
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
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 wanted to work more on other stuff. We both felt Marcelo was a great choice and Marcelo wanted to be 2.4 maintainer