The Linux Kernel Archives

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 3, 2005 @03:57AM 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."

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Re:here's an idea by hpa · 2005-05-03 07:12 · 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.