Slashdot Mirror
Ask Donald Becker
This is a "needs no introduction" introduction, because Donald Becker is one of the people who has been most influential in making GNU/Linux a usable operating system, and is also one of the "fathers" of Beowulf and commodity supercomputing clusters in general. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply, plus a special one for this interview only: "What if we made a Beowulf cluster of these?" is not an appropriate question.
(And this is a serious one!)
Why did you choose Linux, instead of *BSD, to create a Beowulf?
This is a serious question, not a flame: why choose Linux over, say FreeBSD? Is it just because your employer already used Linux? Because you had used Linux before and had more experience working with it? Because you had tested both, and found Linux better than BSD? Or because Linux had tools the *BSD did not have?
Just a question...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What one thing would you like to see added to the Linux Kernel? Why hasn't anyone done that allready? And how would that "One Thing" be better than somebody else's suggestion?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Seein' as we all want to make beowulf clusters out of toasters and keyrings and coffee makers......
What are the five dream machines that you want to have on, under, near, beside or in you over the next 10 years? And what do you forsee actually happening?
And can we make beowulf clusters out of them?
sic transit biscuitus
This reminds me of when I was working at Apple in the secret (heh... my NDA ran out and they did away with the division so it's no longer a secret...) two button mouse division. Basically we used open source tools, like Linux/Emacs and Linux/gcc because they were fast and very functional, but we could never get any of the team leaders to permit them company wide due to the fact that they didn't come shrink wrapped and thus were not officially supported. Now I know that you can get great support from Usenet but that's not good enough for the pinheads who are in upper management at Apple.
So, my question would be, what's the best way for an engineer at a large company to address this issue with the people they report to.
All the best,
--Bob
and what kind of computer gear do you and Fagen have at home?
With your experience creating so many ethernet
drivers do you have any opinions or suggestions
for hardware makers? Aside from good documentation
what makes a given hardware device easy to work
with and what makes a device hard to work with?
Where do you see the Beowulf project going in the future. Plus I hope that this isn't a redundant question but will you be adding MPI into your clusters to create a kind of PVM / MPI hybrid. how about really good documentation. and finally. Have you considered porting your software over to the OS X platform. if so how can the apple community help.
GNU seems best known for applications/utilities like gnupg, gawk, and GNU sed. Since GNU has played such a large (albeit discreet) role in the development of the various GNU/Linux distributions out there, why is the role of GNU in that process so little understood, so misunderstood, and so little recognized? (I get many blank stares when I call it GNU/Linux, even from some very technical folks.)
If you could make a Beowulf cluster out of anything, what would it be and why?
Amen!
What is - in your opinion - the single most important, necessary evolution of GNU/Linux systems to help them become a commodity in the enterprise arena?
What do you see as the future of distributed computing? Will it be massive P2P distributed networks for the masses? Or will it be large commercial distributed networks?
What tools exist that will be used to create this future? What tools still need to be invented?
because i use intel cards in my boxes =)
but, kudos on the hard work
vodka, straight up, thank you!
You've written code that's used by millions of people, just about anyone who's ever networked a Linux box has used your driver. Yet, you're not rich. Would you like to see Linux people chip in a few bucks out of gratitude?
What do you see the future holding for:
(a) Beowulf technology
(b) Different uses for Beowulf
Do you believe X-windows + Gnome & KDE are / can provide an easier gui than available on Windows and Mac OS?
How do you address the issues that Gnu/Linux suffer from by sticking with legacy programming methodologies and legacy (sad but true) programming languagues? Namely, lack of modern programming methodologies like eXtreme Programming and C++ or Java on the language issue.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
how does it feel to be giving all your work away for free when you could be making money working for a big company like microsoft?
If you could add features to the x86 processor or architecture to make clustering work better, what features would you add?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Why did you name it after the epic "Beowulf"?
First one I really think should be in your faq, but that I haven't been able to find there: why did you choose the name of an millenia old epos about a Scandinavian warrior for something that does not even seem distantly related?
Secondly, do you read Slashdot, and if so, what do you think about all the troll jokes about Beowulfs? Was at least funny in the beginning to hear about people "imagining" clusters of just about anything?
Ok, so it was more than two questions. Sue me.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
It seems to have all of the polish and usability Linux/BSD people dream about, whie still maintainging a fully open source BSD core (Darwin). Have you ever been tempted away from Linux like so many ohers?
I want 2D games back.
What's it like living life with ALS, communicating through a computer with only the blinking of your eyes, and not being able to shred Serrana Parts on the guitar or get up on stage with Marty Friedman and Rick Marrino again?
Please donate to the ALS fund -- we need Stephen Hawking and Donald Becker back!
ah, right.
Score -10, Retarded
Why do you think that message passing clusters are more popular than single system image clusters, and do you see the balance changing eventually? In other words, is there no compelling reason to choose single system image for most problems? Also, when do you think that the 32-bit addressing limitations of x86 hardware will become a problem for doing Big Science on clusters?
Stick Men
Is Grid Computing (http://www.butterfly.net)) really the foundation of enterprise-based Beowulf technology? If so, what other modernized aspects can this technology be applied to?
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Do you ever regret leaving Steely Dan?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
You know...
How long ago were these efforts? The current upper management of Apple has built the foundation of their company on FreeBSD with Darwin, so it seems that you crack about the pinheads in Apple upper management is a past tense statement.
In addition to being extremely smart, Donald Becker is a world-class guy. When I was new to Linux, I had trouble with one of his drivers. I emailed him, and within a day he emailed me back. It was a pretty stupid issue - I needed to download the latest drive :) However, he was very nice about it, didn't send me an RTFM - in fact he included instructions for building and installing it.
Anyway, Donald - thanks for helping me out when I was a stupid newbie, you are truly a world-class fellow.
Engineering and the Ultimate
What if you made a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters?
What do you think about the affect of next Linux kernel v 2.6/3.0 on clustering when the new O(1) scheduler and VM and many new features taken into consideration?
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
Dr. Becker,
As I'm sure you've noticed, the price of memory has been driven into the ground -- indeed, it's so inexpensive, the economics seem to have rendered the usage of virtual memory nearly obsolete. Need another 256MB? Spend the $20 and buy it. It's just that simple.
Now, memory makers can't let their goods be absolutely commodified forever, and I'm unconvinced that further speed increases, either in latency or bandwidth, will remain permanently relevant. So I'm curious about your opinion of embedding highly localized simple logical operators amongst the core memory circuitry itself. I've heard a slight amount about work in this direction, and it seems fascinating -- instead of requesting the raw contents of a block of memory, request the contents run through a highly local but massively parallelizable operation -- bit/byte/word interleaved XOR/ADD/MUL, for example. Obviously semiconductors can do more than store and forward; do you believe we a) will and b) should see memory implement trivial operations directly? What about non-turing complete instruction sets?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
P.S. Please forgive me if this entire post reads like "What about a beowulf cluster of DIMMs?"
P.P.S. Be honest: Do you ever find it ironic that the Internet Gold Standard for Ethernet cards ended up being called Tulip?
Thanks for thinking of the children!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
damn, you beat me too it...
Because he actually did, as I had no clue who he was.
And why don't you people like vowels?
(Thanks for the ne2000 driver!)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Please describe the general process you follow for writing and testing ethernet drivers on linux.
A couple more specific questions...
1) What approach do you take in creating drivers for cards which have inaccurate or insufficient documentation?
2) What tools do you use for debugging and and/or "discovering" the workings of old/obscure/poorly documented hardware?
3) What skillset, i.e. languages, knowledge & tools, do you consider necessary to perform the kind of coding you routinely do (outside of hacker wizardry and C mastery)?
I am also wondering how you got started writing ethernet drivers and clustering software for linux. What lead you down this specific path rather than other aspects of kernel/OS development?
JM
What do you think about Java and its role in distributed computing? Do you have much experience with Java, and what are your opinions of it?
Have you actually read Beowulf?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Hmmm... DONALD Fagen... Walter BECKER... and now DONALD BECKER!!!
A crack team of rogue genetic engineers is at work creating MERGED CLONES of famous rock stars!!!
Let us hope that we get to Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger in time, or the world will be in mortal danger from the lips of Mick Tyler!!!
This seems to be a common thread with the past few interviews. Like that burned out 60's 'one-hit wonder' rock star that they interviewed.
As the man responsible for writing multiple network card drivers, you are in a unique position to answer this..
What (FastEthernet/100mb) Network gear manufacturer do you prefer and recommend to others?
Whether its servers, or home use, its an important question, as some are as buggy as all get out, and others are to die for.
And if its a different answer, which manufacturer do YOU use?
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Of naked blonde women with really trim and atheletic bodies, all clustered around my naked body. I want tham all to be pneumatic as in 1984 by Orwell. Can we make a cluster of these? And would it be scaleable to include redheads and brunettes?
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Donald Beckers...
How would I make my own beowulf cluster? What steps are involved? Are there any kernel patches that you have to apply to make it work? How large can they get?
I've read that adaptive networking is very similar to clustering, but are they the same, related, or different? Do you know anything about that?
someone writing network drivers as well as commodity supercomputing software.
Well, what else did you think I was gonna say...?
Q: you have made a large amount of money off the open source community in a way i don't consider on the "up and up". you write drivers for linux while being paid by an employeer, you give away the drivers then personally get a lawyer to threaten the company using your driver with a lawsuit. You then get the offending company to pay up money and take the money for yourself. don't you feel the company you work for and paid you to write that driver deserves the money? I have personally witnessed you do this to many companies (QNX, BeOS and Intel to name three). As an american taxpayer that paid your salary, i want that money - you don't deserve it. you are using open source software as a means to steal basically.
It must have been cool to be part of the Goddard Space Flight Center staff. Did you meet famous people while working there? Didn't this make you want to ditch IT, and become an astronaut yourself instead?
As someone who has made small contributions to the OpenMosix project, while I'm amazed at what clustering can do, I'm dissapointed at the same time at what it cannot.
Distributed shared memory is a big hurdle facing the OpenMosix project over the next couple years. Right now any program that allocates shared memory cannot migrate. What do you think of projects like OpenMosix? Do you think we will reach a point where parallel programming is a thing of the past, discarded in favor of tools like OpenMosix that require no special programming considerations except implementing clean threading?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
How the fuck did a fat pig like Sowboy Squeal get his disgusting picture in the NY Times?
I'll tell you how: 'cause a no talent bum named John Schwartz wrote the article. You remember John Schwartz - he's the dillhole who wrote up an article in the Washington Post about what a Linux expert he had become by installing Corel Linux on his PC. PLUS he got a cooled stuff penguin toy to give to his kids!
How sweet! Just ask Towelboy Kneel!
Donald, as the founder and CTO of Scyld, as well as a member of the board of directors, do you still get to hack, or is your time all taken up with business? Do you ever get the itch to get back to hacking code? If so, what are you working on?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Why did it take so long after 'Gaucho' for you and you cohort Walter Fagen to record another Steely Dan record?
Would you care to comment on your experience in NASA working on an Open Source project? (I understand you've left NASA for Scyld, maybe that partially answers my questions, but I still want to know...)
It seems as if your work on Beowulf clusters had a nice spin-off in terms of providing not only low cost supercomputing for academic, government and industrial users, but also in terms of Ethernet support for all sorts of Linux users.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Hi, Mr. Donald Becker, I'd really like to know if you think that beowulf clusters are real competitors to big processing facilities and why you have chosen Linux, given that Linus himself seems to be addicted to other approaches.
The term open source--it's a philosophy. People don't look at open source; they look at Linux. That's really all it comes down to. People say 'What about Linux, vs. your stuff?' And people are going to look at whether we double our prices or take them down. If we changed our prices, people are still going to look at alternatives.
Second thing, our product is a more complete product. We have a built-in application server that's well integrated; there is no such comparable notion in the Linux server. We have a directory server built in; there is no such comparable thing in Linux. The Linux client hardly runs any applications, except a bunch of shareware stuff that's not very good.
I think it's not complete, it's a poor value proposition vs. Windows. It is a clone of an operating system. There has yet to be any innovation, new features or new capabilities out of the Linux platform. First they cloned Unix, and there are people working on cloning some of our stuff. But it's just a cloning operating system. That doesn't mean we can stand still--we have to push along. But I don't think anyone should expect anything innovative coming out of that world. There's no data to support that.
People highlight, 'OK guys--where's the source code?' I think most people don't want their employees using the source code everyday. Really, they don't. That's a distraction from real work. But a lot of people do have a real need to see source code from time to time for debugging and for security purposes. We've have initiated a shared source program. We're learning, if you will, from the Linux world. We're not above getting smarter every day. If you are a large account, for example, you can get access to source code.
If you take a look at the Linux world, there has been some interesting things going on in the use of community in support tools. There are many more communities in the Windows world than in the Linux world. I don't think we have mobilized that community as effectively as the Linux community has. We have some in Visual Studio, and you will see more and more of that.
In the areas where we think they have a real lead...we're not going to be cheaper to acquire. But we have lower total cost, more complete, more innovative, and we are going to share source as broadly as we can, but not as broadly as they do. And we are going to have as or more a community as Linux does. I think if you put all of that together, that's our competitive proposition.
Hugs and kisses,
Steve Ballmer
What made you believe in the future of Linux? What justifyed the efforts you put into its development? Was it rather the spirit of the community in the early days or maybe rather the realization: "This is _my_ tool, better suited than *BSD, and I can bring it to the point I need it to have."?
While trying to get a RealTek 8139 card to work, I happened upon this. Has anything happened to resolve the situation since this was posted?
What if we made a Beowulf cluster of Donald Becker?
Big companies are jockying for good ground on the subject of Grid Computing. What role does Linux Beowulf have in the future of Grid Computing, and do you think that the community can come up with better Grid solutions than those being pushed by the Big Boys?
Beowulf and similar clusters have hugely lowered the cost of super-computing for a great number of scientific problems. Due to the great interdependance of data and the relative high latency of cluster interconnects, some problems are not easily worked on using clusters. What are the evolving areas of clustered computing? Where are the advances: Are new algorithms being developed for these difficult problems, or are clusters becoming more capable?
- Also -
What tools are seriously lacking in linux clusters? Are open source (or low cost) cluster filesystems necessary to expand the use of beowulf clusters? - Are better libraries needed? Where is research needed?
Ethernet seems to be reaching the end of its usable capacity- a gigabit ethernet card running at full bore (wire speed) can max out many machines both on bus bandwidth and CPU utilization. Infiniband appears to be the best alternative, but acceptance is so slow, it may never make it. There is a linux effort with Infiniband, but due to the slow acceptance and development of Infiniband, it seems we may never see the combination of good working hardware and a complete software implementation of the standard.
If Ethernet consumes too many resources, and Infiniband is stillborn, what's the next communications medium for networking and clustering?
what are your throughts on grid computing?
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
Is this still the case and is there any hope of this deadlock ending? I know some folks have stepped up to maintain what's left of your code in the kernel; are they doing an adequate job?
314-15-9265
Are you related to Boris?
WTF is FNU/Linux? I used Red Hat Linux or Gentoo Linux. Never heard of this 'GNU/Linux.' Why not call it Intel/GNU/Linux? Linux would never have taken off if not for the Intel processors that made home computing affordable.
Maybe we could call it Microsoft/Intel/GNU/Linux, because it's the volume of systems sold with Windows on Intel hardware that make the hardware so affordable..
Can we call it Pretentious Wanker/Stallman? They both go together, too.
Donald Becker,
With all that you've accomplished to date, how much do you think a Beowulf cluster of Donald Beckers could accomplish?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I have seen him answering this question a few times. :-)
He said he was quite happy about it. He contributed just a bit to the Linux kernel, but he got the rest of it for free. He accepted that as rather good payment.
So unless he has changed that view, I'm not really interested in an answer to your question. And I also wonder if he'd care for a Paypalled website, allthough, you never know
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Given the decreasing ratio of power efficiency per transistor for newer generations of commodity CPUs, what suggestions do you have to reduce the total cost of ownership (including the necessary electrical power and cooling infrastructure upgrades)over the lifetime of large computing clusters?
Well, if the goal is TeraFlofs league clusters, What about using other commodity chips, like nvidia/3dlabs/ATI GPUs? Some groups are already working on ways to use GPUs as mathematic coprocessors, using OpenGL to represent numerical vector operations by OpenGl based graphics operations on images.
This is not just academic. GPUs are real Vector processors, some of them capable of +200 GFlpos, using up to 128 bits Floating point precision.
Thats about 100 times faster than Intel based CPUs.
Extending math libs, and adapting MPI to use the cluster GPUs as vector oriented Math co-procesor, could potentially lead to 10 computers TeraFlops level beowulf Clusters.
Beowulf clusters started with a requirement of using "Off The Shelf" components for it's hardware. Now that these clusters have come into their own as a platform, what are some of the interesting hardware improvements that are being proposed or considered, and if you had a wish list, what other improvements would you like to see?
(i.e. We have already seen clusters without disks for each node, what would you like to see next?)
Thanks for all the drivers. There are a *lot* of people (including me, with two cards that use your drivers) that really appreciate what you've done.
May we never see th
RTFM, dammit!!
-- Don
I can imagine an interesting architecture for SHM coherency involving L2 Broadcast as the backhaul and random hash broadcasts for most-recent-update-received synchronization. As long as updates are reasonably rare, this can work astonishingly well, though I must admit writes will inevitably block for significantly longer periods of time than they otherwise would locally. Fits in well with some other packet mangling I'm doing...toss me a mail, will ya?
o -the-2GB-space)
Of course, the obvious approach of only migrating processes and not the shared memory it allocated (instead using SHM-over-TCP-maybe-with-SEQ#'s-directly-mapping-t
also should work.
--Dan
www.doxpara.com
In general, the architecture provided by Beowulf works well on specific classes of problems -- those that can be divided among a large number of processors for simultaneous processing. Figuring out how to do the division of a large problem, however, is decidedly non-trivial. What tools do the commercial supercomputer outfits have to solve the problem that could be adapted to a Beowulf environment?
I am taking a few English courses. And because of you any Google search relating to Beowulf is all fucked up. Fuck you, you dirty GNU/Hippy.
Oh well, back to dowloading pr0n...
Pr0n K1ng
How did you work up your incredible alcohol tolerance?
Here goes:
What drives a guy working at NASA to develop a plethora of Ethernet drivers and architect a distributed computing system?
Was this based on a need for better tools at work? Spare time?
It would be nice to have an anecdote or two about your years with Steely Dan - or even the solo projects from the '80's.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Are you ever mistaken for a member of Steely Dan?
Currently high-performance computers (supercomputers) are subject to export restrictions. Don't want the bad guys simulating their nuclear explosions in software or decrypting our secrets of course. This is an example of technology that can do a lot of good or a lot of bad depending on who's using it.
Though it's certainly impossible at this point, do you think similar restrictions should apply to projects like Beowulf? At what point does the potential for bad things outweigh the potential for good things?
Hi,
Since Intel released it's own GPL'ed drivers for their chips what reason(technically speaking) do you have to maintain your versions? Are there any features that are missing from the Intel versions? Thanks.
So Donald, how do you get your package
in so many peoples box?
Since MPI pretty much forces one to pass data through little tunnels between processes, couldn't this be a widespread method for parallel processing even on single-CPU systems or on SMP systems? It seems like the biggest problem for the typical developer doing multithreaded apps is when they start handling memory that another thread is holding but forgot to lock. Since each "thread" would be a separate program/process using MPI, this would be a lot harder to do. Also, on big iron multi-processor systems running nodes as virtual machines, using MPI would give side benefits more easily, such as being able to add/remove nodes on the fly. Of course, the MPI overhead may be too much of a drain to make it worthwhile. What do you think?
What do you think of openmosix? Is it the "true"
answer for real beowulf computing?
Donald,
As a member of the beowulf@beowulf.org, I have noticed that your posts generally seem to be of a technical, "yes/no, this is how you do it", etc. nature ( which is quite good actually ), and I've never really seen much stating your opinion on the way things are. I've got a few questions :
1) how do you feel about high-speed interfaces, and the parallel code ( i.e. various flavors of MPI ) to take advantage of them? I noticed that every time benchmarks come up for Myrinet or SCI interfaces, we get a minor flamewar between said parties, and noone ever really mentions Infiniband ( and Gigabit ethernet to ea. node is still prohibitively expensive in terms of price/performance at the switch level ). This also brings up issues of free vs. propietary interfaces and software. What do you think are the futures of these technologies, and which model do you prefer : open source or Whatever Gets The Job Done(TM)?
2) why did you pick Linux, as opposed to, say, one of the BSDs? At the time when you started doing Beowulfs, GNU/Linux wasn't the beloved child of the community that it is now, so what prompted the choice?
3) also, what do you see the next wave of clustering to be? We saw mainframes ( Shared Memory Processors ), then high-powered clusters ( ala SP2 + SP3, SMP on ea. node, but no contiguous RAM across all nodes natively ), then the introduction of COTS ( Commodity-Off-The-Shelf ) Beowulfs, then next-generation Beowulfs ( higher-end dual ( sometimes quad or even now some Xeon NUMA boxen ) processor, large amounts of RAM, high-speed SCSI disks, 64 bit PCI or PCI-X, etc. ), which argues that the community goes w/ the next bright idea ( which is dependent on hardware ), and companies go w/ whatever gives them the most bang for their buck. Where do you think we're going now ( as far as the major trend, since there is no 1 answer to the various problems that MPPs are used to address )? Low power consumption, low-heat large farms? I'm all ears...
Anyways, whether these questions get answered or not, thanks for the hard work you've done and all you've given to the community.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Dear Mr. Becker,
What's your favorite flavor of high speed communications card for implementation within a beowulf cluster?
Respectfully,
Can't possibly expect us to just accept a claim like that without proof... so prove it.
And now, of course, it's time for the famous questionnaire invented by Bernard Pivot for Bouillon de Culture...
What is your favorite word?
What is your least favorite word?
What turns you on?
What turns you off?
What is your favorite curse word?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
What profession would least like to attempt?
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
Education is the silver bullet.
You changed to scyld where the main objective is to earn money from the application of high-performance computing. You still make all those drivers available and update them (many thanks for that) but the company also has to make money, you need to pay your meals and your home.
What made you change, and how do you feel about that change now it's been a few years.
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
What features do you predict that will be implenented in NIC's for the near and long term future and is there any functionality that you'd like to see specifically implemented.
Is there a movement in the Beowulf community to develop an effective thread system that can operate over multiple machines?
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Is there any chance you'll get back with Walter Fagen anytime soon for a new Steely Dan album?
Where would a greater return be found for the development effort today? Better cluster software or better end user application tools for cluster software?
RealTek!
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I like the "insightful" moderation.
-B...
One of the things that has already frustrated me the most about Linux is the design of the networking subsystem -- at least from the point of view of a system administrator. The Linux 'ifconfig' command is crippled; it doesn't allow one to set such common options as speed or duplex (and one has to rely on the wireless-tools package for controlling wireless interfaces). Userspace programs don't respond to changes in carrier status -- so laptops never aquire a new dhcp lease when plugged into a new network without manual intervention.
Do you see any of this changing in the near future? Obviously the new hotplug system offers a clean solution to the carrier change issue, if only network drivers would take advantage of it. Will we ever be bale to do something like "ifconfig eth0 ssid 'mynetwork' station 'foo'"? And what about the seldom-used 'ip' command -- where does it fit into things these days?
Lars Kellogg-Stedman <lars@larsshack.org>
Years ago (probably five or six), I was trying to get a NIC to work on my first try at Linux. I had tried everything in the FAQs and was at wits end when I noticed your name and email address in the distro somewhere having to do with network drivers. Out of desperation I sent an email to *gasp* "The Person Who Wrote the Driver", not really expecting a response. Imagine my surprise, as over the next few days you took the time to guide me through the correct process with several emails
Are you still able to find the time to help those in need on a personal level?
What drives you to spend so much of your time doing things for which you receive little or no monetary compensation?
Please note that I do not think that the above is wrong, I just would like to know if we could bottle that driving force and spread it around.
Q that I always wanted to hear Donald's reponse to:
How do you REALLY feel about the split between the drivers that are in the kernel (Jeff Garziks versions) for items like the 8139 and tulip chips and the drivers that are avail. from your site....
Will they ever merge so that there is no need to hunt around for the drivers...
What did NASA think of you using their servers to store the source code to the NIC drivers you made?
PS: Thank you very much for them!
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
I read from Dijstra and Knuth that they both noted how many programmers also played musical instruments - more than the standard population.
This will will not further the clustering field but do you play any musical instruments?
To the moderators, Donald /did/ drink all our scotch. This was during Ottawa Linux symposium beerfest^Wconference.
Hello Donald,
:)
I'm a perl hacker (with a bit of C knowlege) and have made a good career out of it so far.
However, lately I've found myself getting interested in the linux kernel and specifically, device drivers.
My question is.. Where to begin ? I've seen your name in several drivers in the linux kernel (specifically to my case, the Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 card) and have spoken to you on usenet on occasion.
What should a complete beginner like me learn to get into this area ? Specifically, kernel modules in general, hardware drivers in general, researching how to deal with a specific piece of hardware...
Thanks for any tips
I seem to recall IBM had some memory controllers/chips that did compression/decompression to limit bus bandwidth consumption between memory and cpu. in other words, to speed up memory access, much as modems compress/decompress for speed.
Aren't you sick of people confusing you with me?
- java: last I checked this worked...
- c++: mostly implemented, quite functional
Mod this down either as flamebait or outright lies pleaseRumor has it that when you were initially working on the Beowulf project (pre-infancy, while at NASA maybe?) and released some initial code on the web, some government entities were none-to-happy at the prospect of having foreign countries use that code to construct powerful clusters from commodity PCs.. in essence, to side-step export controls. You may also have been abducted and/or charged with "heinous" crimes while they were investigating Beowulf (black-bmw shady government style abduction).
Can you lend any insight as to what these rumors may be based on? Do you have any advice for budding programmers as to how the government might react if we just release world-altering software into the open, like you did?
That's kind of like the old 'stone soup' story, except what if everybody shows up with more rocks and nobody brings any food?
After trying repeatedly to begin migration from Windows to Linux, I've come to realize that one may not do this easily - even if he is very computer literate and has been using computers Mac/Windows/Dos for years.
Installing linux is usually easy enough, but configuring it to have a standardized look and feel is nearly impossible. Getting familiar with linux requires learning commands that are NOT intuitive - such as chmod, urpmi, etc. It also requires countless hours of reading man pages or tutorials which often do not adequately explain what the user is trying to do.
Also, each program, whether graphical or command line, has its own unique interface that doesn't closely resemble its peers.
Linux (as in most users) seem to pride themselves in Linux' counter-intuitive interface where one cannot merely learn it by exploring (pun). I believe linux contributors need to realize the importance of a good UI and the importance of learning by intuition.
Is there any progress being made to ensure the future growth of linux by standardizing commands across distributions, standardizing GUIs, standardizing installations, etc.. so that a person experienced with Windows or Mac can have an easier time migrating? and how have you contributed to that progress?
--- We need more Ron Paul!
With all the interest in clusters Vector based systems seem to have fallen behind at least in the US. Do you think that cheap cluster systems are hurting classical vector based super computers?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In the past, various network topologies were attempted on supercomputers such as the CM5 or T3D, ranging from fully interconnected to 2d toroids to hypercubes. Most Beowulf-class systems are of the fully interconnected variety, which doesn't necessarily scale well beyond a relatively small number of processors. Do you have any thoughts on alternatives, or is this just an issue that will affect too few sites to be worth addressing at this time? Do you anticipate it becoming an issue as we move from discrete clusters to Grids?
In certain Linux Circles, the mention of Donald Becker's drivers is met with raised eyebrows - and polite but marked silence.
Is this just nonsense, or do you actually favour a different spot in the stability/performance/ease-of-implementation triangle than most other driver developers ? If so, why ?
Weren't you in Steely Dan along with Walter Fagen?
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
lets all just
dmesg|grep becker
and give thanxz and praise...
Secondly, what applications are there out there that you think that beowulf-style clusters are especially suitable for that you don't see people applying them to? Personally I have a mini-cluster for POV-Ray, and I know there's lots of people using clusters for more interesting projects like weather analysis, geographical mapping, and nuclear simulation, but what do you think *isn't* taking advantage of this technology that should be? Is there anything that you feel should be advancing that isn't?
Thirdly (and this is totally personal, having grown up in Greenbelt and a frequent visitor to GSFC), are you dismayed that PG county never did much to take advantage of having such a resource as Goddard's Space Flight Center? Aside from naming apartment complexes things like "Goddard Space Village", of course. Or maybe things like Government pay scales are to blame?
Don Becker does indeed ssom to have done some great work, especially on network drivers and clustering.
I can't seem to find any information on his work regarding `making Linux usable' that's mentioned in the byline of this story. Am I missing something, or is that part of the intro a little bit confused (maybe Slashdot has a different definition of usability from the rest of the computing world)?
If you consider yourself an "Open Source" programmer, how do you justify your stance on withholding your driver code from proprietary OSes, since truely "Open" source, lets people use the source code for whatever they want?
When the "Fritz Chip" comes in, will you embrace it and the corporate steamroller behind it, or "OpenSource" it and make it something we all can control?
Your name's been a part of Linux computing since the first day I booted it. I think I know the answer, I just want to be sure. :)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
see subject
Since his company competes with Mosix I expect he'll say go to http://scyld.com/
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
The makefile of the worm source that can be found on the net contains the following comment:
# Most sites will have to remove the "-D" -- send for our souped-up version
# of ctags becker@trantor.harris-atd.com
So I'm dying to know -- is this decompilation the work of the same Don Becker?
The linux kernel has numerous ethernet drivers that you've written. I was wondering how you are able to write and maintain drivers that are compatible with literally dozens of different ethernet cards. How to you manage change control and regression testing?
Azurite is fine covellite is mine.
In retrospect, however, it would seem that the obvious cost benefits of Beowulf very nearly killed the development and use of large SMP and vector processing systems in the US. My understanding of the situation is this:
* Before Beowulf, academics had a very hard time getting time on hideously expensive HPC systems.
* When Beowulf started to prove itself, particularly with embarrassingly parallel problems using MPI, those academics who happened to sit on DARPA review panels pushed hard to choke off funding for other HPC architectures, promising that they could make distributed memory parallel systems all singing, all dancing, and cheap(er).
* They couldn't really deliver, but in the meantime, Federal dollars for large shared memory and vector processing systems vanished, and the product lines and/or vendors with it.... at least in the US.
* Eight years later, only Fujitsu and NEC make truly advanced vector systems, and Cray is only now crawling back out of the muck to deliver a new product. Evidently someone near the Beltway needs a better vector machine, and Congress ain't paying for anything made across the pond.
Cutting to the chase, did you advance a "political" stand among your peers within the public-funded HPC community, or were you just trying to get some work done with the budget available at NASA?
Luke, help me take this mask off
Linksys's early cards were based on the reasonably cheap, if mildly buggy Lite-On PNIC and PNIC II chipsets. I had a generic card with a PNIC II (good luck finding a card that *isn't* Linksys/DLink/etc-branded today!), and was quite happy with it under OS/2, less so under *NIXes around 1999. Then, support was fixed, whatever bugs the PNICs held were worked around, and life was pretty reasonable.
Still, as far as I can tell, all Linksys has done since is improved the PNIC further, nailing more bugs and adding more WOL-type features that nobody uses anyway.
Then again, perhaps I'm just lucky to use *BSD, which seems to have better support for the particular chipsets.
According to this page, the copyright for the rtl8139too driver, a substantial portion of which is your code, was claimed by Jeff Garzik illegally and fraudulently. Is this true? If so, have you done anything in an attempt to get the situation resolved? Do you think that other free software authors should be paranoid about protecting their copyrights?
how much money have you made selling your
"open source" drivers?
doesn't it seem a little bit wrong that you
get a check from the government (i.e. my tax
dollars) and then you turn around and sell
that work to other companies?
Despite (or perhaps because of) long experience with shared memory parallel processors, I don't see distributed shared memory (DSM) as a useful approach. The programmer must write or rewrite the application to very carefully use the shared memory in a way that avoids the write lock from bouncing between systems. It ends up being simpler and faster, for most applications, to just write the direct message passing code.
Mosix is almost completely unrelated to DSM. While I think Mosix is a very interesting academic project, it's the wrong model to build scalable performance clusters. Cluster applications don't want transparent process migration with forwarded paging and I/O. They want to explicitly and quickly start up processes on remote machines, and have direct control over the performance-critical I/O and communication paths.
You must own awful lot of ethernet cards. How many?
I wanted to start using crypto-enabled Ethernet, only to find that Donald Becker has not made drivers for these and that he asks people to directly contact 3Com or Intel for their non-GPL drivers instead. What's preventing Don from writing his own GPL drivers for those cards? Is there some US crypto export restriction law that directly forbids it? The same condition appears to affect several Gigabit cards too: please contact the manufacturer for their non-GPL driver. What's the deal?
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Thanks for your early reply. :)
Mosix is almost completely unrelated to DSM.
Just a clarification, OpenMosix is the pure GPL fork of Mosix (which wasn't all clearly GPL) that plans to eventually implement DSM. I don't know if the Mosix project has such plans or not.
I'd like to forward your thoughts to the openmosix-devel mailing list. I invite you to join the list, subscription is open to the public.
If DSM is indeed a waste of time on top of OM, maybe development time could be better spent elsewhere.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I don't have a question for You. I only know You, because You wrote all the NIC drivers I use. I just wanted to take this oppurtunity to thank You. Maybe You are going to read this thread.
You drivers rock!!!