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Video Interview With Linus On Linux 2.7
daria42 writes "ZDNet Australia has put up a video interview of Linux creator Linus Torvalds talking about the kernel development process, explaining why the unexpected resilience of kernel version 2.6 has delayed the move to 2.7." From the interview: "One of the original worries was that we would not be able to make big changes within the confines of the development model... I always said that if there is something so fundamental that everything will break then we will start at 2.7 at that point... We have been able to do fairly invasive things even while not actually destabilizing the kernel... Having stable and unstable in parallel: I think it used to be a great model, and I think we may see that the kernel has actually become more mature and stable and it just doesn't seem to be that great a model, for the kernel."
It would be nice if the video on Linux could be viewed on Linux.
How difficult is it to release a video about linux kernel development in a format that is easy to watch by people running linux? At least use flash 7...no need to blow their minds talking about ogg/theora.
Visit the download page from a Linux browser and you can download Flash 9 for Linux now. And P.S. the beta was out for months before this was...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Having stable and unstable in parallel: I think it used to be a great model
It certainly works when dual-booting.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I've never bothered to look at a video interview on the net (part often not being able to, part just not liking video on my desktop, part that the moving images distract me from all the multitasking I somehow can do while reading), but if someone could post a transcript of what was said, I'd be sure to read it :)
I can't watch the video due on that site, but I really am not certain what he is trying to say from the text I can read.
Does he want to sacrifice stability for innovativeness in kernel 2.7 or does he think that things are going fine the way they are right now with a stable and an unstable kernel?
Does it contain anything inflammatory about the GPL v3? If not, I'm not interested. :]
He's basically saying that no one is really developing a 2.7 kernel because 2.6 is extremely stable even with whatever experimentation they've done. He states that theres been times where they've gone over the 2 month release cycle because of the "big changes" they've done on the kernel. He states that unstable next to stable used to be a good model but it isn't good anymore. He states that if there was a 2.7 kernel they'd have to do all sorts of backporting to get whatever fixes on the 2.7 kernel to work on the 2.6 kernel.
In my opinion, the real reason for no 2.7 is:
If we open up an unstable branch, I have less testers. --Linus Torvalds
I'm not saying the 2.6 series is unstable or anything, either. However as I watch Linux's development from the sidelines, I get the impression that most policy decisions Linus makes are designed to make his life easier. See also: Bitkeeper.
The resiliency of the 2.6 kernel is most certainly due to corporate involvement in the development of and support for Linux. Companies can't design, build, test, and support product for a moving target.
If anyone wanted to seriously break the Linux kernel ABI, I don't think corporate interests or major distros would support it or follow.
OSes or platforms seem to change rapidly up until the point they reach a critical mass - at which point, the next ABI change is cause for general revolt. After that, $ENTITY learns their lesson and vows to never significantly break backwards compatibility again.
explaining why the unexpected resilience of kernel version 2.6 has delayed the move to 2.7.
Uh...resilience?
2.6 releases have "shipped" numerous times with some serious bugs, probably because Linus and company have let lots of people slip major new features into the 2.6 kernel, when it's supposed to be stable. 2.6 kernels regularly make it SEVERAL "point" releases into each point release:
Go and look at the timestamps on 'em on ftp.kernel.org. Some of the sub-versions are just a few days apart. How the hell are end-users supposed to know when the kernel is ACTUALLY useable, if there are THIRTY SEVEN bug-fix releases?
One of the more amazing bugs involved a bug in md that would hose raid partitions, and I assure you, it was not the only serious filesystem bug. I lost a reiserfs partition thanks to a half-baked 2.6 release.
Please help metamoderate.
I thought the odd numbers were "run with it" kernels. Leave the even number kernels static for bugfixing only.
How about 2.9 then. Blue sky how would you design an OS for all the cheap commodity hardware around.
Deleted
apparently, zdnet isn't ready for desktop yet
The release notes suggest that beta 1 doesn't work but beta 2 does!
"...2.6 kernel is still the development kernel...."
can anyone post this "fragmented" and unaccessible interview video to youtube or google video as one or two big file(s)?
I wonder how far Linus would have gotten if he had found so many ways to free up his time.
Not that I'm a fan of Adobe's flash player. I still open a 32 bit browser whenever I absolutely need flash, and use a 64 bit browser the rest of the time. One of the main reasons I'm still using my old SoundBlaster Live! is because it has hardware mixing, and gets around problems like what it sounds you are experiencing.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
had to say it
Oh come on, that's harsh. He's only accused of killing his wife.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It's Easy, I'm assuming you're using Firefox, so fire up Nano and open the file "/etc/firefox/firefoxrc" (as root)
Add this line: FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" (remove FIREFOX_DSP=)
Install the alsa-oss package.
Restart FF, and you are playing sound!
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
So does any one wonder if there is ever going to be a 2.8 or a 3.0 Kernel?
This is just speculation but...
I'm guessing as soon as Ingo Molnar and friends get the real time premption patch fully
merged into the mainline we'll see a new Kernel release (not a 2.6.x+1)
Money is the root of all evil?
Add this line: FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" (remove FIREFOX_DSP=)
Install the alsa-oss package.
Restart FF, and you are playing sound! Um, I'm not sure what planet you are living on, but that's not "easy". It's tedious and frustrating.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The second half -- hell yeah.
Too bad, Gnash is already out there.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
We have been able to do fairly invasive things even while not actually destabilizing the kernel...
Oh gods, my sides hurt sooo much.
and make it work really easy, so if you have 10 linux workstations for example they'll piss all over 10 boxes with Vista!!! And without configuration just have them on the same subnet and they'll do that automatically.
Then call it kernel 2.7
Neither do I have a firefoxrc anywhere in my system nor does about:config show something even remotely similar to FIREFOX_DSP
Besides, flash is only for those folks, that run some kind of intel like CPU.
Changing one line in a text file, then typing "apt-get install alsa-oss" is at least as simple as operating a coffee machine.
Address your complaints to Adobe for only supporting OSS
Laziness is one of three virtues of the good programmer, according to Larry Wall. And I believe he is on to something.
It's still better than Flash 7. During the few times the audio actually worked at all it was horribly out of sync. And then if you're actually using flash (ie, watching a video) there would usually be about a 70% chance of it crashing the browser (Firefox really needs to sandbox plugins, a plugin should not crash the browser or pose a security risk...).
I've been using the Flash 9 beta since the first release. So far, no crashes. No loss in audio. And synchronized A/V. I don't know why the GP has audio problems, must be an issue with his setup (I'm using Ubuntu Edgy and their Firefox). I still use Flashblock, though, due to fscking Flash ads.
Did anyone see the star at 0:58, he is clearly the son of Christ.
Either that or he can see 'microsft users... All The Time!'
I dunno, sounds pretty easy to me.. inconvenient maybe, but hardly tedious and frustrating compared to say trying to get games working properly on WINE. Seems like a stroll in the park
which is totally what she said
Flash 9 for Linux uses Alsa (and only Alsa, no OSS anymore), and it "plays nice" with other Alsa-using sound apps just fine.
not on my machine. the video frezes at 3/4 of the playthru and the sound is gone. to make it more interesting the whole browser has to be restarted to get anything in flash to work again. i'll wait for the next version, perhaps in that it will work. tested with both fx 1.5 and 2.0, none of them wanted to work properly with it, kernel is 2.6.18 no other problem with alsa sound anywhere else, go figure.
and some smartkickass javascript checks still don't realize that you have version 9 which is greater than 8, and go on complaining and redirect you somewhere else.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
I have a french press, which is much easier than the instructions. I don't even have buttons, just one plunger.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Heh, see, even Linus has gone Agile. New-wave 2.0 web developers rejoice! :-)
I take it you've never had to fix anything with regedit either then?
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And yes, I use Linux (among other OS'es). Have been using it since 1999, and I'm a card-carrying member of a national LUG. But anyone who says that "It's easy, just edit this text file and install these apps and you are all set" is totally, 100% missing the point. Tasks like that are way beyond the capabilities of most users. They just want their systems to work. And if it's so easy to fix the problem, why isn't it fixed by default? Why are tasks like that left to the user to figure out?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Woo Hoo 2.8 here we come.. err ummm.. McFry's anyone?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
He's probably from a planet where the OS used on most desktops requires regular tinkering with something arkane called "registry", comparing to that changing plain text files (that either contain helpful coments or are described in program manuals) seems easy.
I am getting ridiculously anti-Linux pro-Windows videoad with this story on /.
Irony.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
VFS probably needs to be addressed. Reiserfs4 sort of exposed some of the issues. There are others though. To my knowledge ext2/3 are the only OSes that actually code strcitly against VFS and the other layers. XFS, JFS, Reiserfs, etc.. are all hacked in to it. If you follow the kernel list, you'll see nobody uses JFS and XFS seems to have regular crash reports. Upon using it myself (for 5 years) it has memory leaks, it routinely has trouble with new kernels. There have been regular performance regressions. Now, I don't really care about the filesystem itself that much but it seems fundamentally broken to me that a non-experimental filesystem has such routine problems. Either the API is uses is broken, the filesystem is broken or both. I'm becoming more inclined to think that it's VFS. This creates a circular sort of problem, you don't need VFS if ext2,3,4 are the only filesystems that are really supported, it's not nearly as important as it is treated. Either that or the process of having something included and non-experimental needs to include some kind of support aspect and maybe be rethought. So far as I can tell, IBM isn't really doing much more with JFS and nobody uses it, let's move to remove it (bummer too because it's a quite clean and elegant FS, much better than reiserfs or xfs in terms of code and design quality and cleanness.) There isn't a clean process for removing stuff from the kernel. Reiserfs is a prime example, Reiserfs3 isn't supported, time to move to remove it; it has known bugs and design flaws which are not being addressed. This particular area is more complex also because selinux depends on filesystem support, LVM behaves differently with different filesystems, different filesystems have different and variable tools support.. System filesystems need some work too, what's debugfs? configfs? How is sysfs different than configfs or procfs?
Filesystems are just an easy to see and expose portion of this problem there are other APIs which have the same issues. We retooled the build system a few years back, it's much better but there are major flaws still. There are drivers which cannot work unless loaded as a module and yet they can be linked in. There are a huge number that depend on other subsystems and you can easily misconfigure them (SATA depends on parts of SCSI. So I can static link some SATA modules in and dynamic link parts of the SCSI system in and the build system won't complain. Worse, if I break it just so, I can actually get it to build cleanly and freak out at runtime) I'm not advocating making it more difficult to hack on the kernel or add new modules to the build but it's fucked if it doens't catch that stuff. Worse, the driver is fucked if it can't be statically linked and if that's an acceptable limitation then it should be an option. (the Fusion series of RAID/SCSI/SAS type drivers is one that suffers from this problem) At the same time the build system is holy, good luck changing that without pissing off half the free world, and I don't even want to think about what would have to happen if it required a change to a .config file to take it to the next level. Part of the beauty of Linux in this regard is that it is remarkably simple to build and get involved with, there really aren't any tricks or anything to building it. This is something else where there needs to be a support component. There are good companies with well supported drivers and there are orphans. I'd rather have modules marked as supported or unsupported than whether or not they are GPL clean or tainted, I'd like to see that
Well I use Debian Etch and Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy on several different systems and I've never had a problem with what you are describing. My sound in the browser "Just Works".
Now I don't doubt that yours is not working, for whatever reason. I guess my point is usually things just work for me using Debian or Ubuntu. Sometimes they don't, rarely these days, but it happens. When things don't work I occassionly have to do something odd or tedious to get it to work again. But this is true of any OS and I've spent at least as long in Windows trying to get something that should have been easy to work and it's not always simple.
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s/web browser/propritary browser plugin that uses an obsolete/deprecated audio output system/
Fortunately Flash 9 is now available (at least for i386) and so this particular piece of config-file cargo-culting can by forgotten, and sink back to the depths of the Pit from whence it came.
So to sum up the interview, Lunis says he is still chasing Microsoft's tail lights.
It's too bad Lunis doesn't throw some of his concern toward worthless efforts like making a useful installer which will work on all distros, or toward making Lunix able to install without manual work... both things the venerable Windows 95 accomplished far better than Lunix does today.
But hey, Lunix is all about choice, so feel free to choose among one of the zillions of different text editors, and dream about the day all the game creators will realize OpenGL is teh bettar than DirectX.
Works fine in Ubuntu. I'm not sure how they do it but it works out of the box no problems.
What distro are you using?
Actually, I dug this up from Kubuntu Dapper, and the previous one (sorry, I forgot the name of it). It's a fluke that only happens with Intel onboard AC`97 audio chips. (My *other* computer has no issues, just this one with the 865PERL mobo).
I agree it's a PITA for newbies, but hardly something so hard that it can't be fixed.
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
OSS sound is deprecated? So much for ALSA just being an alternative, now it is crammed down our throats.
ALSA is LINUX specific, OSS is cross platform. We are taking a step back just because the high end audio people want extra features.
Make it an OSS extension, or just go ahead with the ALSA push and let's make Linux specific APIs and drop any pretense of UNIX/POSIX compatibility.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Frankly, in this area, "UNIX/POSIX" compatibility can go fuck itself. Does POSIX even specify audio output interfaces? Did "UNIX" (System V? BSD?) even ever have sound output?
ALSA is not only desired by high-end audio users. All users want basic features such as the ability for two programs to use the sound card at the same time. ALSA provides this (part of alsa-lib) and OSS does not.
ALSA is not necessarily Linux-specific. As far as application programs are concerned, ALSA is merely a stable program library (libasound.so.2). Nothing stops you from porting alsa-lib to another platform, or implementing another library with the same interface. If would probably be quite easy to get it working today, by configuring alsa-lib to use the pcm plugin that talks to Pulse Audio server, which can output to OSS or many other sound systems/devices/interfaces.
Finally, if you bothered to do the most basic research about the i386 GNU/Linux Flash player, you would have found out that it is Adobe's plan to separate out the GNU/Linux-specific parts of the player into a separate library with a stable interface. Anyone (who uses i386) would then be able to implement their own platform-specific replacement and thus get the Flash player running on their platform.
I believe the point of the post was that the operation was abstract and required extra knowledge, not that there are better/worse alternatives. The point is, you still have to learn/know something. The only way to avoid it is to make it work out of the box. Power users and people interested in stuff like that (geeks) may not care. But for everyone else it's like their car broke down in the middle of the road. They have no way of fixing it other than calling a mechanic or learning more about the car themselves--neither of which they are interested in except that it is the only way to get the car working again.
Whilst I liked most of your post, I disagree with you on one point.
That point is JFS, I use it almost exclusively on my boxen (6 so far) with Gentoo.
If you take a look at the Gentoo forums (forums.gentoo.org) you will also find other people using it.
I am sure there are many others besides.
The rationale behind "there are no posts on the kernel dev list about JFS therefore no one is using it!" is flawed and incorrect.
There are posts on the kernel dev list - the one about JFS that I can see is: -
JFS: possible recursive locking detected Tomasz Kvarsin (Tue Jan 09 2007 - 02:33:50 EST)
Also JFS is in tree, stable and has very few problems.
When breaking changes are made to the kernel that affect JFS they go and fix it up just like all other in tree modules.
IBM also is usually very quick with other fixes that are necessary from past kernel patch reports.
Therefore I would expect not to see many posts about it on the kernel dev list.
People who are happily using stuff don't generally post to the kernel dev list about it and so it can seem that a piece of functionality is not used when in fact it may be widely used.
I consider JFS to be the best available file system at the moment if you want stability, reliability, journaling and good performance.
So lets not remove it otherwise me and possibly many others like me would be very unhappy.
"I've never had a problem with what you are describing."
I'm not describing it, others are. My Linux-box has died due to hardware-failure, so this issue does not affect me sinse I don't have a working Linux-installation at all. But the point is that no-one should tell other how "easy" it is to fix a problem, when all you have to do is to edit few text-files and install few apps. First of all, the problem should not exist at all. Second: Editing text-files and installing apps is not "easy" for regural users. It's easy for powerusers, but for that soccer-mom down the street it's too much.
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So why don't we just forget this crap about "year of the Linux-desktop" then?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
You're totally right on this point, but I [i]still[/i] wouldn't classify editing one line in a text file and then typing one command as "tedious and frustrating".
I've never claimed it's all happy automagical justworksness, however one diff would remove this insurmountable hurtle and since the GGP or wherever it was seems to be relatively technologically savvy, one bug report to his distribution could fix this for all.
And yes, I use Linux (among other OS'es). Have been using it since 1999, and I really don't care if my grandma uses it.
What does "the soccer mom down the street" do when Windows gets spyware? A virus? What if a driver downloaded from Windows Automatic Updates hoses the video card?
You seem to think that any and all things to do with computers should be easy to fix. Their not always. Fixing the issue with the sound sounded pretty damn easy to me compared to some things I've had to deal with on both Linux and Windows.
Not to mention your comment about your box dieing from a hardware failure. Hearing that I'm thinking "so this guy put Linux on an old, dieing box and is wondering why it sucked?". Have you tried a modern distro on a modern PC? "Look mom! No config files to edit!"
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OK sure, I can agree with that. But it seems from reading the post and especially the follow ups that the guy threw Linux on an old box with the expectation that he wouldn't like it.
To continue your car analogy (love the car analogies!) it's like someone driving a beat up, 89 Nova and wondering why it so hard to keep going. Oh and then blaming Ford for selling him a POS.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Er, I mean, blaming Chevy.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal