Slashdot Mirror
Interview With WOLK Creator Marc-Christian Peterse
Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has spoken with Marc-Christian Petersen, who originated the WOLK project in March of 2002. WOLK is the Working Overloaded Linux Kernel, a large set of nearly 450 useful patches applied against the current stable 2.4 Linux kernel tree. The project has recently expanded to offer a second 'secure' patchset, this one against the older stable 2.2 tree.
In this interview, Marc-Christian Petersen tells the history behind WOLK and discusses many of the patches included."
Actually, I disagree. I have found the WOLK kernels to contain a lot of the fixes and features we needed all in one convenient package. Of course, I stress tested the WOLK servers before putting them into the production server room. I would highly recommend anyone that is curious in the WOLK kernels to use them in a production environment.
cpeterso
WOLK is not for production use, but the -secure 2.2 kernel is (I've asked Marc and he later included this in his announcement to lkml).
I'm using it on a server and it works great.
First ? Nope - Before Wolk was Folk (the Functionally Overloaded Linux Kernel).
Fork ? Nope, just some some guy with the help of the few, to bring to the unwashed masses the kernel that the people with the time to hunt down and find patches have.
It's a patch set to the main kernel - Just with a crap load of really good stuff added on. Stuff that is out there, in the great open wastes of mailing lists.
ps.. WOLK is a great topping for your LFS cake.
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
Compressed caching is the introduction of a new level into the virtual memory hierarchy. Specifically, RAM is used to store both an uncompressed cache of pages in their 'natural' encoding, and a compressed cache of pages in some compressed format. By using RAM to store some number of compressed pages, the effective size of RAM is increased, and this way the number of page faults that must be serviced by very slow hard disks is decreased.
This is exactly the technique that Connectix's "RAM Doubler", a replacement for the Macintosh System 7 virtual memory manager, used way back in 1996. I wonder if Connectix has a patent on it.
SuperMount has the ability to access your cd's/floppies on the fly without need to mount / umount them every time.
Mac OS has automounted removable media since 1984.
It's good to see that Linux is progressing as a kernel for a workstation OS. But even its major proponents admit that it has some catching up to do. WOLK is a step in the right direction.
Will I retire or break 10K?
For 3D, I think that having kernel-level acceleration is inevitable.
It's not required. The utah-glx project which provided 3d support for the XFree86 3.x series did not need a kernel driver. The DRI kernel driver is needed for properly storing the video card state when switching tasks to allow multiple programs to make use of the video card. The real 3d stuff is still in the XFree driver.