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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.)"
The standard KDE argument:
>A GNOME spreadsheet you want Miguel? Don't worry. The way things are
>looking, I can hack one out in a few days. We will borrow from X, Y, and Z
>projects since they have most of the functionality we need. It will be a
>matter of fitting them all together."
I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome, as if it is a bad thing to re-use and adopt none-Gnome supporting libraries,
It is my vision that this is one of the great strengths of Gnome. In Gnome the supporting libraries are almost never Gnome dependent they often use already existing libraries or help to modify them too their needs, without Gnome-ifying them. When they create a new one for use in Gnome they tend too make it as generic as possible, With this sort of philosophy you create functionality that is easily adopted by other projects or was already in use or planned to get used. Things like Cairo (X-server), Fontconfig, ATK, etc. This is exactly why this functionality is popping up everywhere in open-source land. Which makes the KDE supporters scream that Gnome is taking everything over. This isn't true, but Gnome by using the above philosophy, doesn't alienate itself from other Linux/*nix projects in stark contrast too KDE. Gnome is not only about building a great desktop, it is about building modular desktop technology that can be used and reused by more projects then Gnome only, which make Gnome more cooperative too other projects then KDE.
As example below a quote from Robert Love (from kernel fame) in a interview too Arts-Technica developing for Ximian about his project Utopia:
[Begin quote]
Love: Project Utopia's goal is to fully integrate the Linux system, from the kernel on up the stack, through the GNOME desktop, its applications, and finally to the user. Therefore, Project Utopia is very GNOME-specific.
But Project Utopia is composed of many small components, and each component is intentionally being developed separately and abstractly. Thus, a GNOME desktop (or any desktop) is not required for much of the functionality and another desktop environment could (and should!) provide the missing pieces.
The system is architect-ed in such a way that the only components actually at the desktop layer are policy mechanisms, such as gnome-volume-manager, and glue layers/libraries, such as any forthcoming notification system.
Components such as udev and hotplug are obviously entirely agnostic to the rest of the system, as they are (or will be) required pieces of nearly any Linux system. Other components, such as D-BUS and HAL, can likewise fit into any system. I very much hope that both of those projects find wide adoption.
In response to your example, I think that a server with no desktop environment would still benefit from this work. In fact, it would just use Project Utopia as far up the stack as needed, definitely making use of udev, D-BUS, and HAL.
[End Quote]
Now do you think that at KDE they will be glad to get such technology? Oh sure they will take it and probably "adapt" it (like the Borg that is) into there desktop, but for sure the work they will put into it will only benefit KDE and while this is happening they will scream and whine till the end that Gnome is about adopting and Gnome-ifying (giving project Utopia as example off-course, because the technology will get adapted in lots of non-gnome projects), while little somebody else can use is coming from the KDE community (it is all of the KDE or die, look at Red-hat and user-Linux how KDE treads other visions).
The question is: Do you want a *nux/Linux community desktop which takes from (Fontconfig, Cairo, librsvg, etc) and gives too (Project Utopia, GTK+, Freedesktop.org, Gstreamer, ATK, Pango, etc) other projects (Xfree86, XFCE4, etc) without making everything it touches Gnome or do we want the none-*nix/Linux philosophy of one big API in the form of a win32 clone which alienates everything no
Project Utopia is going to glue a whole bunch of stuff together. Meanwhile, some of the pieces look interesting.
Is udev ready for use by typical Linux users (as opposed to kernel hackers)? How about sysfs -- that is just part of 2.6 and is completely ready, right? How about D-BUS?
Meanwhile, on a flamefest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion about KDE and GNOME, I saw a claim made that "hardly any GNOME applications use Bonobo". Is that true? If it is true, is it changing? (Wasn't a Network Object Model one of the fundamental things about gNOMe?)
I browsed RML's blog, and some of the screenshots look really cool. I'm really looking forward to this stuff.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Erm no. To initially add a new process to the scheduler list takes longer (which is what the parent said); however once it's added it can be accessed in the same time regardless of the total size of the list. So it takes slightly longer to start the process, however once it's started the scheduler takes the same amount of time to do its work regardless of the total number of processes running, hence O(1)
This is just demonstrating the universal tradeoff in algorithm design: faster add vs faster access (see INSERT vs SELECT in DBs)
Carpe Daemon