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Talk to the IBM Linux Hackers
We've all heard plenty about IBM's investment in Linux, but we don't hear much from -- or about -- the actual Linux developers at IBM. This interview is not with one person, but with a number of IBM Linux people spearheaded by Dave Hansen, who volunteered to help us with this interview. Of the group responding to your questions, Dave says, "There are more people, but the majority of the group's skills are represented. No surprise that we'll have our responses reviewed before we send them back to you, but we'll try to expedite that.
"A little background:
The group's experience is pretty broad. Most members were Sequent employees who worked on Dynix/PTX before IBM acquired Sequent (we are still mostly based in Beaverton, OR). Not everyone was with Sequent; Matt Dobson and Dave Hansen came into the group last summer, right out of college. A few of our Austin colleagues are long time IBM employees who worked on the AIX kernel before moving to Linux. Ask about anything from the rmap VM, to PTX's crashdump facilities, to life in Portland :)
- Martin Bligh - Large IA32 system VM scalability, Specweb, NUMA
- Dave Hansen - Big Kernel Lock, SMP locking, Specweb99
- Matt Dobson - NUMA API/ Documentation
- Rick Lindsley - SMP/NUMA Locking, Performance Tuning
- Patricia Gaughen - Discontiguous Memory for NUMA
- Bill Irwin - VM/rmap hacker
- Hanna Linder - dcache_lock scalability
- Janet Morgan - I/O Scalability
- Ruth Forrester - database/performance/scalability"
Minor correction on this - Linux already runs both natively AND under virtualization on high-end machines, like IBM's zSeries mainframes.
That says nothing about the main point of the question of 64-128 processor multi-processors.
I'm a developer for AIX. I can tell you there is NO sharing of source between the two areas. AIX is the old proprietary world of software engineering. The licenses are your typical "if you copy that floppy you're a BAD BAD person...". I know people in the LTC and none of them have read access to the AIX source repository. IBM is as paranoid of the GPL as Microsoft is. Since I do device driver work, I'm not even allowed to look at the Linux kernel source.
There's a pretty large (virtual) fence between the AIX and Linux hackers. That doesn't stop IBM from trying to get AIXisms into Linux (read JFS and powerpc optimizations).
If the economy wasn't so damn bad I'd have transferred over to the LTC long ago...
(posting anonymously to keep my job...)
Just to clarify, you mean for the older laptops right ? I have had the pleasure of owning an a20p, a22p, and now an a31P, all of them were freed from windows within the first day that I got them. Apart from the modem, everything worked flawlessly.
.. thinkpads with Linux. Was the market really that low ? Or was there pressure from outside forces to sell only MS Laptops ?.
This new a31p has a built in wireless card, that was the only thing that needed work, and once I put 2.5.13 on it, even that card worked fine. I used the stock redhat 7.3 CD to install everything. Even X.
The video card on this laptop is an ATI Mobility Fire GL 7800 (64MB video card), it's supposed to be bad-ass, only Dell ships with a 64MB nvidia to compete with this a31 model btw.
Apart from the modem, I think IBM's laptops are the greatest mobile machines to install Linux on.
But aside from that, I agree with the final question. About this time last year, you could find Linux pre-installed on the ibm.com website, hell it was even advertised
I have the ThinkPad 600e. I installed RedHat 7.3 on it, and it works wonderfully. X came up without issue. I run wireless on it at work and home.
Oh, sound was an issue, but IBM's website tells you how to make it work. It uses the cs4232 driver. The device does not init correctly on boot for some reason, so if you remove then remodprobe the module it works fine.
I'm unable to suspend to disk, but I didn't set up a partition for that. Haven't seen if Windows will still do it after I repartitioned.
I'm looking forward to the suspend to RAM functionality of the 2.5 kernel.
I've been trying to get the serial port to work today without much success. I believe I have the tools required.
The MWave soft modem driver was released just a bit ago (source and all I believe), I have downloaded the driver, but haven't tried it yet.
I've gotten DVD working great with mplayer (be sure to use the FFmpeg library). On a P2-400MHz!
All in all I'm very pleased! I got mine for a song on Ebay.
There are various aspects of the laptop that are still not supported under linux:
1) The "Thinkpad" button for example.
2) The notorious inability to have simultaneous CRT+LCD display on the T2x machines (with Savage chipsets)
3) No 3D graphics support for the T2x based machines.
Your sound chip is getting messed up when the PCMCIA
daemon does its hardware probing. (The Linux cs4232
module doesn't grab all of the ports that the sound
system actually uses.) Check the resources used by
the sound chip under Windows and exclude them in the
PCMCIA configuration file.
Well, the research group at Watson has a Redhat 7.1/7.2 based distribution called the "Client for eBusiness" that's available to IBM'ers to install on their machines. It's not really supported, per se, but most people that would install it wouldn't call the help desk anyway. It's got various tweaks to make it more friendly to the infrastructure here.
I personally use SuSE 8.0 Professional on my workstation (I'm typing on it right now, in fact). We have our own internal mirrors that have the latest Linux distributions on them - that's where I got my copy from.
Most people use the Client for eBusiness, but I'm more comfortable with SuSE.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
All of the people listed are still employed by IBM, working on Linux, and reading slashdot (including me). (Well, ok, not sure if all of them read slashdot :)
Yes, the layoffs did not completely miss the Linux folks in Beaverton (or elsewhere) but I think IBM's commitment to Linux is underscored by how it was minimized.
You need a little util from the IBM site to "enable" the serial port. Cant really remember the name of the app... I think i booted from a win98 startdiskette with the app on. Google is your friend.