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Extensive Coverage of Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006
cdlu writes "LWN and NewsForge both extensively covered the goings-on at this year's OLS. NewsForge: day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4. LWN (subscription required for most): article 1, article 2, article 3, and article 4." I especially enjoyed the description of reverse engineering a USB device from cdlu's coverage of day 3; one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux! Update: 07/25 04:57 GMT by T : Eric Preston, who delivered that talk on reverse engineering USB devices, kindly linked to both his slides and the accompanying screenshots.
How long can this event be held in canada? I mean, sure its the right environment for penguins now but what about global warming?
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The best presentations, IMHO:
Killing Kittens (David Arlie)
LuserSpace sucks (DaveJ)
Myths about Linux (Greg KH)
OK, not the exact names, but you get the picture.
The first one adresses graphic vendors that think their closed driver has fairy poo on them.
The second adresses brain dead programmers that keep mistreating files AND the general OS.
The third has the coolest last slide I've seen in a presentation.
how long until
Almost 1,000 pages of very interesting whitepapers from the event can be found in the first and second PDFs.
Getting a driver into Linux is so full of road hazards because the "community"(read: the loudest mouths) is too idealistic, eccentric, and inflexible...and as a result, most companies go "fuck that 2% of the market" and release Windows drivers that, long as they work, nobody complains about, ever. Even MacOS X is easier; it's a much more stable "target" hardware/software-wise, and the community doesn't mix politics with purchases.
Not to mention most likely Brand X wireless card came complete with drivers from OEM company Z, just with Brand X silkscreened on the PCB...and Brand X couldn't "release" the drivers or write open-source ones if they wanted to.
Please help metamoderate.
That's a pity that a few talks about containers (OS-level virtualization, a la advanced Jails, a la Solaris Zones/Partitions) were not covered at all. There were (at least) four of them:
- Eric Biederman's talk about namespaces
- Cedric Le Goater's talk about application mobility (a.k.a. live migration of containers)
- A BOF on containers, moderated by Dave Hansen
- A BOF on the resource management (one of the components of containers), moderated by Dipkanar Sarma
There was also a half-an-hour discussion about containers on the Kernel Summit. Let me summarise all these in a few lines:
1. Containers are a real alternative (or a good addition) to Xen and paravirtualization. In most cases they can be used for same applications, without incurring all the Xen's overhead and dirty hacks)
2. Everybody wants containers in the mainstream kernel
3. There are different implementations (IBM's stuff, OpenVZ, Linux-VServer, and Eric's) and their developers need to agree upon them what to submit/push into mainline. This is hard to do, but a required step.
4. Resource management: User Beancounters from OpenVZ is a good (the only?) candidate for inclusion into mainstream.
-- Kir Kolyshkin, OpenVZ project leader.
Has the Wireless USB (WUSB) specification even been finalized yet? Isn't it a little early to get excited about a niche protocol that may never reach the market?
Or does the submitter not understand the difference between Wireless USB and USB Wireless Networking Adapters?
"Corbet says that there's not a firm kernel bug count. As the number of users increases, he noted, so to does the number of bug reports. More code means more bugs, even if the proportion of bugs (bugs per thousand lines of code) drops."
Oh dear. I can see that being quoted.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
(Ottawa)(Linux)(Symposium) (2006) Hhhm.. something tells me no booth babes were present..
//WR
You know, I used to think just like this -- though I didn't consider it 'whining', I worried about the practice, thinking it might just put the vendors off.
And then I watched the OpenBSD project flame the hell out of a Hifn representative for asserting that his company provided 'open documentation' (when in fact acquiring said documentation required registration that the OpenBSD developers felt violated their privacy). When I first read the systematically harsh response to the Hifn representative (including Theo's threat to drop the free driver from the OpenBSD tree), I was absolutely stunned that a group of free software developers would be so reckless.
But it got me thinking... we can't all bend over and ask for it from the vendors forever. Linux marketshare is growing in every segment, and we do have an increasing amount of support from giants like IBM. If it were possible for the projects to take a unified stance (across Linux and the three *BSDs) and persistently demand programming specifications from the vendors, what's going to happen -- they're going to say "fuck you for asking" and drop their binary drivers too?
Something tells me that giving your customers the finger, even if it's only an operating system or two only represent 6-10% of your desktop market, isn't the sort of thing you do to appease shareholders. So while they might not respond immediately, it's not like we're losing anything.
I'm thinking we should start a unified petition to AMD now that they're acquiring ATI - form an online petition to AMD that says "We are NVIDIA customers who will eBay our GPUs tomorrow and buy ATI if you release open drivers".
Nobody wants vendors to release drivers. We don't want them, and we never will want them. Simply supply the docs they already have, and let us make drivers. We will support their hardware for them, for free, and it will always be up to date, always work out of the box, and always be consistant with other similar hardware for users. Quit re-hashing the same stupid excuses that have nothing to do with reality.
Vancouver? When I was there, a fishing guide described a 3 million dollar house in Vancouver as a "shack".
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Tea looks rather brown to me.
Actually, tea escapes anyway because the caffeine isn't added. If you can find a heavenly plant that grows fruit containing Mountain Dew as the juice, you'll have solved the problem. I don't know if genetic engineering counts.
I accept your second point, and begin working on it. I'll upload the changed source code for the plant's DNA on sourceforge.
I must argue your first point.
Black tea is red. You could call it brown, but you could also call GNU, Unix.
White tea isn't brown at all.
Green tea isn't either.
Oolong tea isn't and has a respectable amount of caffeine.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I recently bought a Huawei CDMA card. It worked 'out of the box' with Ubuntu. The USB version also worked first time.
Of course, we had to figure out the wvdial config file to make it do anything, but that didn't take long.
Max.
one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux!
Yeah right. That will happen the day after video card manufacturers release Free Software drivers...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
No, I am not trying to sell something -- OpenVZ is free software (free as in freedom). By the way, OpenVZ developers fixed a lot of bugs in mainstream, so they are rather fixing your kernel than fucking it up. All of the OpenVZ code is #ifdef'd so if no appropriate options are selected the code is not compiled in. Finally, you do not understand what containers are useable for...hmm I can try and give you some examples if you like. Basically, the same isolation/security that you'd rather use VMware for -- the only thing is with containers you do not have to pay performance penalty. Also, containers are hardware-independent, they can be managed "en masse" (unlike VMware VMs), they can be live migrated from box to box. And in case you do not want to run different kernels -- containers are much better/efficient to use than full VMs. Speaking of multiple root users on the box -- each and every HSP sells those cheap VPSs based on one of the existing implementation of containers. They sell it as cheap as $10/month or so -- and the root access is included. So go buy one and try to crack the system. I mean, please do not spread the "it's totally insecure" FUD if you do not have any real experience with that.
-- Kir Kolyshkin, OpenVZ project leader.