Ask New 2.4 Maintainer Marcelo Tosatti Anything

Linus keeps hinting (declaring, even) that he's nearly ready to work full-time on the 2.5 development branch of his kernel, and hand the 2.4 kernel off to Marcelo Tosatti. Marcelo's graciously agreeed to answer questions (you might want to read some of his mailing list contributions first), so here's your chance to ask him what he'll do in the famous footsteps of Linus and Alan Cox, and how he got there. Please only put one question per post; we'll pass along the top-rated comments to Marcelo for his answers, and hear back from him shortly.

Comments

Coup

[ksw2]

Do you ever have strange, murky dreams about launching a major coup against the established leaders of the Linux kernel, surmounting their positions and establishing yourself as the all-time evil maniacal leader of Linux? (mwuhahaha)

vi or emacs?

[bnatale]

vi or emacs ?

If I can get the damn memory bugs fixed...

[jd]

I'll be releasing 2.3.1 of the FOLK patch series, the moment I can get this last show-stopper stopped. I would be VERY surprised if even half the list, as it stands, EVER makes it into the official 2.4.x, or indeed into the 2.5.x branch. If you want the nice stuff, you'll need to stick to fringe projects like FOLK, which stick these code fragments together.

Folk 2.3.1 includes:

• Alan Cox's 2.4.13-ac8 patch
  
• IBM's JFS
  
• SGI's XFS
  
• DriverFS
  
• DAPFS
  
• The LSM & SE-Linux patches (yay!)
  
• The low-latency code
  
• misc. AA patches
  
• PP-SCSI
  
• RML's latest preempt-kernel patches
  
• IBM's MXT
  
• IPVS virtual server support
  
• KAIO async. I/O support
  
• Tux2
  
• Scheduled Transfer Protocol
  
• Post/Wait
  
• VLAN 801.1Q support
  
• IPPersonality
  
• WANPipe
  
• Etherdivert
  
• gkhi
  
• dr_alloc
  

(This list is not, by any stretch of the imagination, difinitive. If I find anything else to put in, prior to rolling a tarball, I'll try and work it in.)

I have three questions

[jmcneill]

1. What is your name?
2. What is your quest?
3. What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Re:Alan Cox and politics

[MikeBabcock]

It has for a long time been a political statement about free software actually ...

You are an encouragement to 18 yr olds everywhere!

[danpbrowning]

Marcelo,

I must say that you are an amazing yet rare individual, to have commanded that much respect at the age of 18. Wow. I can't handle OS design now, let alone when I was 18. Would you be so kind as to share some about your upbringing, environment, faith, or other factors that were beneficial to you in making you who you are today?

Thank you,

Re:Hardware to support in 2.4?

[johnjones]

any chance of getting MIPS synced up with the main line kernel ?

Alan Cox has made huge progress syncing the ARM specific stuff into the main kernel
( Ipaq's use ARM and so do alot of PDA's/Phones)

David Miller has taken up the sparc torch and gets into the mainline pretty much instantly
(sparcs are used in SUN kit and ... clones)

MIPS does not have a champion that gets stuff into the main line kernel would you do this ?

regards john jones

Which term do you prefer?

[George Walker Bush]

Dago or wop?

Story Title

[Spunk]

Ask New 2.4 Maintainer Marcelo Tosatti Anything

2.4 is my favorite software package. I hear the new version, "Linux," is going to be really good.