The Linux Kernel Archives

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."

Comments

Bandwidth and Slashdot Effect on kernel.org

[xmas2003]

The normal bandwidth used by kernel.org is between 150 to 200 megabits per second, at times when "nothing major is happening," Peter said. "Quite honestly, the test releases aren't even a blip on our radar," he added, referring to the -pre and -rc kernels, explaining that they don't noticeably increase the amount of bandwidth that is consumed. Only when an official stable release is announced does kernel.org see a spike in traffic. For example, with the upcoming 2.6.12 release Peter predicted, "I expect it go to the high 200's, for about a day." He noted that even with a direct link from a busy website such as Slashdot, that was about as much bandwidth consumption as they see from a kernel release. "What really drives up the load average is when one of the distributions that we mirror makes a release," he explained, "such as one of the Fedora cores. The kernel is only a few tens of megabytes, whereas a fedora core is a couple of gigabytes." With the upcoming release of Fedora Core 4, Peter predicts that both gigabit links will probably be saturated for 3 or 4 days. "This is largely speculation, because never before have we had the capability of serving that much traffic."

Re:Yes but...

[timeOday]

I wonder what they use that 10 TB of disk for? I would think every version of the Linux kernel ever released would fit in the 24 GB of RAM.

OS

[w_arthurton]

I wonder what operating system they are running. :)