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Linus on Linux in 1994
Vrallis writes "Ten years ago this month, Linux Journal christened their maiden issue with an interview with Linus Torvalds. It is definitely worth the read, and worth some reflection on just how far Linux has come in the last decade."
...Beowulf Journal.
"What the hell is an aluminum falcon?"
Since then Linux has traveled around the sun ten times but its still in the same old place.
I guess that's what happens when you run servers on Linux, instead of stable, guaranteed solutions like Windows and Unixware
I'm curious if anyone remebers the Linus - Tanenbaum: polemics.
Of course Mach is a great idea: WIndows NT/2000, NeXT, Mac OS X, OpenDarwin, etc. but Linux is not dying...
You can defy gravity... for a short time
Bill Gates: "Linus who?"
-m
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# Modus Ponens
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"In 1994, Linux was mostly a toy OS. Really not much of anything more than a bootloader. A shell of an operating system."
"Ten years later... well, it's basically the same thing, but it's been ported to every damn computer out there!"
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Christening the maiden. Why does that sound so very naughty to me?
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
Now I wasn't around for kernel 1.x, but I certainly have extensive experience with 2.4 and now 2.6. I even used distros back in the day that were based on 2.0 and 2.2. I cannot believe how far Linux has come - just take (for example) Gnome. I used to use the console alone because the two main WMs - Gnome and KDE - were klunky and not very usable. The text rendered horribly even at higher resolutions.
In addition, with the recently added hotplug functionality it is no longer necessary to know the exact specs for your hardware in some cases - it is automatically detected and supported.
It still has a ways to go though. Second-generation hardware is still not supported well enough yet - for example, ACPI doesn't work properly on my A7N8X Dlx. The system randomly crashes with it enabled and generates a ton of interrupt errors.
I am really quite impressed with the new functionality of the 2.6 series kernels. I think I'll go off and upgrade to 2.6.2 now...
Ads? What ads?
Linus (rhymes with shyness) Torvalds (author of the Linux kernel, see box) traded e-mails with us for several days in January giving us his views on the future direction of Linux (rhymes with clinics) and his ongoing role in its development.
Linux Journal: Ken Thompson was once asked, if he had the chance to do it all again, what changes would he make in Unix. He said he would add an e to the creat system call.
How about you and Linux?
Linus: Well, Considering how well it has turned out, I really can't say something went wrong: I have done a few design mistakes, and most often those have required re-writing code (sometimes only a bit, sometimes large chunks) to correct for them, but that can't be avoided when you don't really know all the problems
If it's something I have problems with, it's usually the interface between user-level programs and the kernel: kernel-kernel relations I can fix easily in one place, but when I notice that the design of a system call is bad, changing that is rather harder, and mostly involves adding a new system call which has semantics that are the superset of the old and then leaving in a compatibility-hack so that the old calls still work. Ugly, and I avoid it unless it really has to be done.
Right now I'd actually prefer to change the semantics of the and write() system calls subtly, but the gains aren't really worth the trouble.
Linux Journal: The most consistent compliment that Linux receives is its stability on Intel PC computers. This is particularly true compared to ``real Unices'' that have been ported to the Intel platform.
What do you see that was done right in Linux that is causing problems for these other PC Unices?
Linus: There are probably a couple of reasons. One is simply the design, which is rather simple, and naturally suits the PC architecture rather well. That makes many things easier. I'd suspect that the other reason is due to rather stable drivers: PC hardware is truly horrendous in that there are lots of different manufacturers, and not all of them do things the same (or even according to specs).
That results in major problems for anybody who needs to write a driver that works on different systems, but in the case of linux this is at least partially solved by reasonably direct access to a large number of different machines. The development cycle of linux helps find these hardware problems: with many small incremental releases, it's much easier to find out exactly what piece of code breaks/fixes some hardware. Other distributions (commercial or the BSD 386-project which uses a different release schedule) have more problems in finding out why something doesn't work on a few machines even though it seems to work on all the others.
Linux Journal: Have you heard of any problems running Linux on the Pentium chip? Do you expect any?
Linus: I know from a number of reports that it works, and that the boot-up detection routines even identify the chip as a Pentium ("uname -a" will give "i586" with reasonably new kls, as I ignore Intel guidelines about the name). The problems are not likely to occur due to the actual processor itself, as much as with the surrounding hardware: with a Pentium chip, manufacturers are much more likely to use more exotic hardware controllers for better performance, and the drivers for them all won't necessarily exist for linux yet. So I've had a few reports of a Pentium PCI machine working fine, but that the kernel then doesn't recognize the SCSI hard disk, for example.
From a performance viewpoint, the current gcc compiler isn't able to do Pentium-specific optimizations, so sadly linux won't be able to take full advantage of the processor right now. I don't know when gcc will have Pentium-optimization support, but I expect it will come eventually (most of the logic for it should already be there, as gcc can already handle similar optimization problems for other complex processors).
One interesting thing is that the "bogo-mips" loop I use to calibrat
notice the sudden increase of crap in 2.4.2 . that must be when they add the stolen unix code.
They asked Linus this question in 1994. And are we all using Amigas and DEC Alphas? Nope. I wonder what assumptions that we're making these days (x86_64 will take over the desktop, Microsoft will keep losing market share to Linux, Slashdot will eventually get redesigned, etc.) will end up being dead wrong, and funny when you look back. Maybe all of the above ...
It's quite amusing to consider how far Linus' operating system has come, how big it has become - to the point of challenging the multi-billion dollar corporations - when you think that at the start, Linus himself had said Linux wouldn't "be big and professional like gnu". Or to quote the original USENET post:
Heh."Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
Bill Gates: "Destroy him, my scobots"
I was completely riveted by the portion of the interview that detailed the night on which Linus broke into SCO headquarters to steal their intellectual property.
It's nice to know that 10 years later, he probably still hasn't gone through that entire cache of toilet paper.
...then I'll take some heed as to your notion of "appropriate" or not with respect to comments.
Linus et. al. have created an operating system I have used for over a decade and made over a million dollars using. If they find a little harmless humor or expressive freedom in swearing on occasion in the comments of their code, more power to them.
Saying "this implimentation if f*cked and needs fixed" is (in context) informative even if it is vulgar, and, quite frankly, it is their code, not Disney's (or $CO's).
i know that when i do coding, i try to make sure that not only the code itself is of high quality, but also that the comments are informative and useful -- not vulgar.
i just think that it's a childish thing to do.
It is no more childish than chiding someone who has put countless hours of hard work in for your benefit because their linguistic aesthetic differs from yours.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
In article peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
/can/
>adam@flammulated.owlnet.rice.edu (Adam Justin Thornton) writes:
>> I'm frustrated because I'm too cheap to buy a decent OS for my 386 and GNU OS
>> isn't out yet and I have to run this silly little loader called MSDOS.
>
>Well, check out comp.os.minix. As the Arch-OS/2 fiend Peter Busser has informed
>me, there's a 386 kernel called linux under development in Finland. You need
>MINIX to bring it up, though.
Happily this isn't true any more (needing minix, that is). Linux
be used without minix, but it's not a tool for a user yet. Hacker-
material (ie I've got gcc, uemacs etc, but no real utils). Wait for
Hurd if you want something real. It's fun hacking it, though (but I'm
biased).
Linus "finger me for more info" Torvalds
(torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
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Hehe, I wonder if he is still waiting for Hurd to do something real.
You may have already found this, but the article is also in the Linux Journal Archive, here: http://www.iar.unlp.edu.ar/~fede/revistas/lj/Magaz ines/LJ1/2736.html
philcrissman.com.