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"

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.

Comments

not laid off?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's widely known that IBM is laying off Linux specialists and indeed laid off many in Portland just last week (which was widely discussed in the local Linux user-group discussions, so it's not exactly a secret). Considering that IBM laid off a bunch of Linux folks in Portland last week, are we sure this interview group is still employed? And can you comment on IBM's commitment to Linux when it is in fact laying off Linux specialists nationwide?

Corporate oversight .vs. free flow of information

[Ashurbanipal]

You're right, I'm not suprised that your responses have to be vetted by management. But, I'd love to know what guidelines IBM has for hackers' interaction with the rest of the GNU/Linux/Internet community. Are you allowed to criticise IBM management, or other IBM products, for example?

Which came first?

[programic]

Did IBMs embrace for Java spawn the emphasis on Linux, or was it the other way around.

Or are the two entirely unrelated?

Cross-platform applications with Java, Mono etc.

[alext]

IBM must have a particular interest in making Linux apps easily deployable across different hardware platforms (x86, PPC, S/390 etc.) But for many Linux users, downloading an x86 binary is much easier than building the app from scratch.

DotNET will add a major cross-platform capability to Windows apps - there is a risk that this could leave Linux high and dry.

Is there a specific IBM strategy addressing this problem, e.g.

• Ensure C/C++ builds are available for each platform
  
• Use IBM Java
  
• See if Mono or DotGNU take off and adopt one of them
  
• Something else?