Slashdot Mirror
KernelTrap Interviews Andrea Arcangeli
An anonymous reader writes "Andrea Arcangeli completely rewrote the 2.4 Linux kernel virtual memory subsystem several years ago, a surprising event during the evolution of a stable kernel series. A very intelligent 27-year-old from Italy, Andrea spoke with KernelTrap in great detail about the past, present and future of his Linux kernel efforts. An interesting interview ."
Linux hacker : Age 27 : lives with in parents house.
Who'd've thunk it, eh?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Very nice to see some recognition for the kernel developers and other Free Software developers.
To me, they really are some sort of modern day heroes.
Andrea Arcangeli: I've no degree yet, the only piece of paper I have is the high school diploma. I wasn't that bad at school, for instance I surprisingly got 60/60 votation in the diploma and maximal votes at University too for all the software related exams, and I loved studying physics and electronics too (not only computers). It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much. I've seen a lot of this with folks to receive their backgrounds from non-traditional sources such as Computer Learning Center and the like.
It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.
...
... and nor is education.
It always amazes me how stupidly ignorant white-boy can seem to be about his fantastic education system and how it seems you can't do 'anything' in the world without a certificate from some organized education front
Please. "Higher Education" is fine and dandy, but it is a luxury that many people, striving hard to survive and live another day, just simply cannot afford.
Many times, striving hard to educate oneself is simply far, far superior than "working hard to get educated by someone else"...
It sickens me how much people rely on 'modern education systems' for their personal enhancement. Personal enhancement is not something you can only get at school
Life is School. But school is not life!
It always amazes me when people, without formal education, can accomplish so much.
Yeah, mostly high achievers graduate from Yale and Harvard first and then distinguish themselves by serving their country selflessly before going on to make the world a better, safer place.Andrea spoke with KernelTrap in great detail about the past, present and future of his Linux kernel efforts.
Sorry, looks like she's a he. I was really hoping it would turn out to be a chick - chicks that can rewrite Linux components are extremely sexy.
He has higher education, he just doesn't have the degree. The article indicates that he learned a great deal from his college courses.
;-)
A degree gets you an interview. What you learned gets you the job. AA skipped the interview step
If you understand this sentence you know you're a geek.
Poor Andrea, now he is going to get slashdotted by a bunch of lonely geeks that didn't RTFA, and think that he is a she.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Currently this isn't possible. For our application we had to make a very nasty hack to our SCSI driver.
What we would have liked to do would have been something like:
Get physical address from libpci
mmap region to user process
open a rawio device
read()/write() the rawio device to-from the mmap()'d buffers to effect DMA transfers directly to the PCI device.
In our case (a streaming media server) we have no need whatsoever to bring the disk buffers into main memory.
Programmed transfers from main memory to PCI memory are expensive.
after reading that article i feel as though my programming skills are on par with a primate.
Live off the land
Modify our cars
Hack computers
Understand personal finance
Write contracts
Defend ourselves in court
Defend ourselves physically
Handle a gun safely
Think critically
Change our government for the better
It seems to me that too much focus is given to understanding the past and not enough to understanding the present. Don't get me wrong, knowing the past is valuable, but I think that if we teach people about the present, people are naturally going to be interested in the past.
In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.
I found this bit really interesting (and insightful, actually, more on that below):
I bring it up because this is so contrary to the common opinion on /., which is that TCPA is unabashedly evil and has no utility. Andrea is obviously one very smart guy, and a person who feels the need to have complete control over his machine, but who likes TCPA in spite of the risk of misuse. Contradiction?
The fact is that TCPA *is* an extremely useful and valuable technology for systems that require a high degree of security. It's not clear to me that the average home PC benefits from it, but it's very valuable for cheap, high-performance key management systems and cryptographic accelerators, systems that contain valuable data (like many businessmen's laptops), and systems at critical points in network infrastructure. I'm sure there are other valuable, and non rights-eroding, applications as well.
In my work as a designer and developer of high-security systems, I'm extremely excited about the fact that we can now buy low-end computing equipment that has TCP hardware. It enables so much. The next step is TCP hardware that is tamper-resistant, or even tamper-reactive, but still cheap. For now, really high-security systems still require something better, but TCPA can fill the niche between systems that require serious security and those that can get by with purely software-based security (or no security, which is fine for the majority of desktops and laptops).
To be clear, DRM is a bad idea, in general. The business applications (self-destructing documents, confidential documents that cannot be printed) do have potential utility, but I doubt they're worth the complexity they'll create. And Palladium aka NGSCB aka whatever-it's-called-today is an unquestionably evil notion, focused on removing the ability of people to control their own hardware, in an effort to allow a couple of declining business models to prop one another up.
IMO, what geek activists need to focus on is not killing the development of tools like TCPA, but rather on legal and social means of ensuring our rights.
Tools are not evil. Only users are evil.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Andrea did some cool stuff. How come our high schools don't teach us how to:
# Live off the land
If your high school is in a (sub/)urban area, how useful is this? Or possible?
# Modify our cars
My high school had auto courses (my school was in Southern Ontario, Canada)
# Hack computers
I took 4 or 5 computer courses in high school. Basic application use, programming in Turing and C++, graphics in 3D Studio, large projects.
# Understand personal finance
I believe there were business courses along these lines, I didn't take any, though. I think this was also covered in the general stream of math.
# Write contracts
# Defend ourselves in court
We had grade 12 and 13 law. I'm not sure how much time was given to contracts (I only took half of the grade 12 course), but we even went on a visit to court in both mandatory grade 10 history and optional grade 12 law.
# Defend ourselves physically
In grade 9 gym we covered wrestling. The upper gym courses covered more defense.
# Handle a gun safely
Not really a big deal in Canada. I know a lot of people who learned this in cadets or the reserves, though.
# Change our government for the better
History (Canadian, Ancient, American, 20th Century), Politics, Law...all covered this. Your comment about understanding the past rather than the present is missing the point entirely. But we did always talk about current elections in classes, even in elementary school.
# Think critically
In general, people don't need to know how to calculate the area under a curve. But everyone needs to know how to think critically and not be manipulated.
Doesn't calculating the area under a curve require critical thinking?? Regardless, Calculus wasn't taught till grade 13, and anything past grade 10 math was optional. If you're school taught you anything at all you probably learned to think critically. Didn't you have to write essays? Solve problems? Every single one of our grade 13 classes had an "independent study unit" which we had to do something on our own, requiring critical thinking.
We even covered media bias in our english classes (I didn't take the full english media class, but we did cover it in the required grade 13 english class). We took stories and advertisements from different newspapers and looked at their political bias. Then we watched some Chomsky videos.
As far as I can tell most Americans seem to need to move to Canada to actually get their American values.
The parallel port ZIP drive maintainer asked them to provide a function prototype of this thing that they were talking about, of them (Phil/Tim) quickly whipped up a rough 50 line C header file which was turned into a working parport driver + parport enabled ZIP and printer driver (removing the infamous "printer-on-fire" message in the process). There were bugs in the parport driver (it was the first pass but you could print and use the ZIP drive together which was something that previously could not be done) but Phil/Tim/Andrea quickly pounced on the driver and straighten it out. Some of the routines for supporting NatSemi and SMC chipsets are there due to the ZIP drive maintainer not being able to use EPP mode on his Dell desktop.
When Andrea first appeared on the parallel port scene he was lacking a little confidence (appologising for his poor english which was far better than my italian :-) but once he got his feet wet with kernel hacking there was nothing stopping him.
Unfortunately I dropped out of the parallel port group around 2000 due to work commitments (linux hacking was one of those phases that I went through).
I congratulate Andrea on where his life has taken him.
ZombieEngineer
Formerly-the-hacker-who-maintained-linux-zip-drive rs.