Ars Technica Interviews Robert Love

functor writes "Ars Technica has interviewed kernel hacker Robert M. Love of MontaVista/Ximian fame. He covers current and future developments in the Linux kernel and on the desktop, particularly concerning the Linux process scheduler and its enhancements for system responsiveness and also his work toward Project Utopia, an effort to make Linux's device management on the (GNOME) desktop transparent and seamless. (Robert Love is the principal hacker who worked on kernel preemption for the Linux 2.6 kernel.)"

Comments

Re:I appreciate his work on the scheduler

[functor]

Perhaps you'd wish to appreciate Ingo Molnar's work? Robert Love's work has been to make the kernel mostly preemptible, rather than to make its scheduling algorithm more efficient.

Re:How much of this is ready for use?

[nitehorse]

Oh, wow.

I'm not even a GNOME hacker and I can tell you you're pretty far off.

D-BUS isn't meant to replace Bonobo at all. D-BUS is a message bus architecture meant for passing messages between applications and the system - e.g. for the kernel to tell the desktop "Hey, I mounted a USB flash drive at /mnt/usb!" or "The user inserted an Audio CD". Bonobo is a cross-application component embedding system so that you can have the AbiWord viewer embedded into Evolution for inline-viewing of an attached word-processing document.

(FWIW, D-BUS is modelled heavily on DCOP, which we've had in KDE since KDE 2.0. D-BUS has both a system-bus mode and a session-bus mode, however, which DCOP does not, as DCOP is a session-bus system only. The current talk indicates that we'll be moving wholesale to D-BUS for KDE4.)

Re:How much of this is ready for use?

[be-fan]

It is true that hardly any GNOME applications use Bonobo. Its use is limited to Nautilus, AbiWord, and Gnumeric as far as I can tell. The Network Object Model was supposed to be a fundemental part of GNOME, but they really dropped the ball with it.

You see, Bonobo is based on CORBA. And CORBA, as I can tell you from working on a fairly large project using it, is a total piece of crap. Its a design-by-committe API that has no semblence of order, and requires a thousand page manual to describe a fundementally simple concept. Oh sure, CORBA is great in theory. Its platform independent, network transparent, feature-packed, well-supported by the industry, and with a good ORB (OmniORB or ORBit) can be quite fast. Its also an absolute bitch to program, and the API (especially the C++ one) is more horrid than even MFC!

When the component models of GNOME and KDE were being designed, I remember the debate between using CORBA and making something new. The GNOME people went with CORBA and stuck to it. The KDE people tried a CORBA-based system (OpenParts) realized how badly it sucked, and ultimately rolled their own (KParts). The GNOME people ridiculed them for going that route (reinventing the wheel, they said). Well, it is now 2004, and KParts is a phenomenal success on KDE, thanks to its simplicity and power. Meanwhile, Bonobo is pretty much marginal on the GNOME platform, even according to original creator.