Talk to the IBM Linux Hackers

Posted by Roblimo on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @05:30AM from the billion-dollar-men-and-women dept.

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"

As usual, please ask only one question per post. We'll forward 10 of the highest moderated questions to Dave, and run all the answers, verbatim, as soon as we get them back.

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Re:OS Blending by Anonymous Coward · 2002-05-28 05:55 · Score: 3, Informative

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...)