Kernel Summit Wrapup

Jonathan Corbet at LWN has posted a terrific summary of the first Day of the Ottawa Kernel Summit, and you should expect the second day soon. In it he relates the greatest hits of the first day's talks, including the AMD Hammer Port, Block I/O, Modules, and more. For mp3s or oggs of this event, check out the Kernel Summit MP3 Repository on SourceForge. The big news is the desire to feature freeze 2.5 within 4 or 5 months. Halloween. I've posted a very small gallery of the group pictures from the summit on my site.

Comments

Day Two Summary is available

[boa13]

I just saw the link on... Slashdot. Gee, these little side boxes are helpful sometimes. ;)

Re:modules, and why Rusty is wrong:

[ipfwadm]

"Your mouse has moved. Windows must be restarted for the changes to take effect. Reboot now? [OK]"

Watching karma fall through the floor for supporting Microsoft...

I have Windows 2000 on one of my systems, and this rebooting-after-everything is not nearly as much of a problem as it once was. Yes, after installing critical updates, the system does need to be rebooted, and some software still requests reboots on installation (which I typically ignore). But gone are the days where changing an IP address or other network settings would require a reboot. That's one of the big things Microsoft tried to do w/ W2K, cut down the number of trivial things that required reboots.

(Disclaimer: the system I'm typing this on is a Linux box that hasn't been rebooted in almost six months)

PC110

[BJH]

For those of you who might be wondering, the small PC that Alan Cox is shown as using in the photo is an IBM PC110.
It's a full x86 PC, not a PocketPC or PDA - and what's really amazing is it was put on the market in 1995.
I own three of the things... in 2000, the last stocks were sold for ridiculously low prices (compared to the price when it was originally sold, anyway), and I happened to have some cash in my pocket. At least they're small enough to not annoy my wife ;)
Anybody wanting to buy one should be able to find one on ebay fairly cheaply.

Re:modules, and why Rusty is wrong:

[rodgerd]

Broken binary compatability is considered by Linus to be a feature, not a bug. Essentially the kernel developers are unwilling to be constrained in their maniuplation of kernel internals by people who don't want to provide source.

The arguments around this have been hashed out time and time again on the l-k mailing list.

Re:modules, and why Rusty is wrong:

[Ami Ganguli]

The reality right now is that the vast majority of drivers do provide source, so everything works pretty well. Requiring backwards binary compatibility for the modules interface would hurt everybody (because it creates cruft and a maintenance headache) and benefit only a few short-sighted companies

Remember that the general attitude towards binary-only modules is "we'll tolerate it, but if it breaks you keep both pieces". Nobody is demanding source, they just want to minimize the damage of closed-source code in the kernel. There's no reason everybody should suffer because of a few companies.