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."

Comments

Re:What about the newbies

[Anonymous Coward]

Your red hat kernel already has (I believe) quite a few patches put over the standard, vanilla kernel. Of course, Redhat's purpose is to make the kernel as stable as possible, not to add as many odd features as possible.

Re:Production servers

[jaoswald]

I'm not a kernel aficionado, but the one that gives me the willies is the Compressed RAM caching. That sounds like a gimmicky fix for "too cheap to buy real RAM."

That and the quoted emphasis on MP3/audio performance seem like this package is not aimed at real production situations, but personal workstation.

I realize that these features can be managed individually, but then what is the advantage over managing these by oneself?

Re:Things I'd like to see in the kernel...

[oever]

5) A standard "driver package" format containing the kernel module, user-mode tools and installation instructions for binary only (yecc) drivers. (One driver fits all distros!)

This is a complete don't care for me. If it comes with a binary-only module, I don't buy it. I'm still running a Matrox G400 at home as a result. Generally, I think kernel developer sentiment is turning more and more negative towards binary-only drivers--I wouldn't expect the community to do much, if anything, to make it easier for such developers.

I agree. A better solution would be to have a mechanism in place that allows a driver module to be compiled from source easily, without the need of having a previous compiled kernel. Maybe this mechanism exists, I don't know. I've never seen it though.

Ideal scenario:
A new device is being developed. The manufacturer writes a driver for all relevant kernel versions and mails it to Linus. At some point after this, the drivers shows up in the relevant kernels. Now the new hardware hits the market with a source-only driver and a compile script that figures out which kernel is present on the system for the people who do not run the newest kernel.

If a scenario like this is formalized, it will give hardware manufacturers more incentive to write drivers for linux, since it will be easier to garantee that the hardware will work with a stable kernel.