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The Linux Kernel Archives

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the huey-lewis-takes-us-back-in-time dept.

Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap offers an interesting look at the history behind the Linux Kernel Archives, home of the Linux kernel. They start from the beginning in 1997, when kernel.org ran on a generic "white box PC" using a shared T1, to the present where it runs on multiple quad Opterons each with 24 gigabytes of RAM, 10 terabytes of disk space, and a gigabit link to the internet. Much of the article is based on an interview with Peter Anvin, also including quotes from Linus Torvalds, Paul Vixie of Internet Systems Consortium, Inc who donates the bandwidth, and Matt Taggart of Hewlett-Packard who donated the hardware."

6 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yes but... by tehshen · · Score: 2, Informative

    At this time, the servers run Fedora Core and use the 2.6 kernel provided by RedHat.

    Yup.

    --
    Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
  2. Re:Hat's off to HP by Polycom+Sucks · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'll second this. Their support for many things is outstanding. HP really does seem to care about the end users.

    I have seen them support networking equipment purchased second (third?) hand off of eBay without asking "Where did you buy it?" or anything like that.

    In another instance, one of their supprot people searched through several dozen models of laptops and found one in a different product line that had compatible drivers so that an OS besides Windows XP could be used. No other company has come close to providing this level of support.

  3. Re:here's an idea by hpa · · Score: 4, Informative

    We have, indeed, considered that, but it'd not really buy us anything. Earlier Apaches would sit on a lot of memory while serving large files, but current versions just have a thread sitting in sendfile(), which is just about as lightweight as you get.

    Sure, the startup cost of the transaction is higher than for a lightweight HTTP server, but the startup cost of the transaction isn't a big deal for us, and we appreciate the flexibility that Apache offers.

  4. Re:That's what rsync does by hpa · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fortunately, rsync has a compression exclude list.

  5. Re:Yes but... by hpa · · Score: 2, Informative

    mirrors.kernel.org takes up most of the disk space. 10 TB obviously includes plenty of room to grow.

  6. Re:noatime interesting by Al+Al+Cool+J · · Score: 2, Informative

    Gentoo has noatime as default. There's even a comment in /etc/ftsab about how it improves performance.