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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."
first
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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?
Well, my message for the newscasters: Flash doesn't play well with Linux, my friend! I can't watch your interview. Did you not know that?
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, $ENTITY learns their lesson and vows to never significantly break backwards compatibility again.
explaining why the unexpected resilience of kernel version 2.6 has delayed the move to 2.7.
Uh...resilience?
2.6 releases have "shipped" numerous times with some serious bugs, probably because Linus and company have let lots of people slip major new features into the 2.6 kernel, when it's supposed to be stable. 2.6 kernels regularly make it SEVERAL "point" releases into each point release:
Go and look at the timestamps on 'em on ftp.kernel.org. Some of the sub-versions are just a few days apart. How the hell are end-users supposed to know when the kernel is ACTUALLY useable, if there are THIRTY SEVEN bug-fix releases?
One of the more amazing bugs involved a bug in md that would hose raid partitions, and I assure you, it was not the only serious filesystem bug. I lost a reiserfs partition thanks to a half-baked 2.6 release.
Please help metamoderate.
I thought the odd numbers were "run with it" kernels. Leave the even number kernels static for bugfixing only.
How about 2.9 then. Blue sky how would you design an OS for all the cheap commodity hardware around.
Deleted
apparently, zdnet isn't ready for desktop yet
The release notes suggest that beta 1 doesn't work but beta 2 does!
"...2.6 kernel is still the development kernel...."
can anyone post this "fragmented" and unaccessible interview video to youtube or google video as one or two big file(s)?
for me anyway, glad some folks can use it I guess...
.avi download that works with sound and video. I wish zdnet and every other tech site out there would at least offer something a bit better than this flashy crapola.
OK, I didn't know the full release of 9 was out, so I went and downloaded it, closed the browser as per instructiones from adobe central, installed it, opened the browser back, went back to zdnutz, flash video works ok, but still no *&^^*^$#g sound, exactly the same as before, I can't see a whit of difference between it and the 7 version here (I checked,new install says 9), where I never got so much as a peep. And my sound works fine, closed xmms to listen to the torvalds interview. Xine, I get sound, xmms, sound, mplayer, sound, yada yada, every other audio video thing on here that is supposed to have sound works after install, flash, nyet, no effin sound. I don't get it, what the heck are they doing so completely different from everyone else that there is no sound??? I mean I don't even see a sound volume setting when the video starts up, just a forward arrow and the pause if you mash it. those "settings" you get when you right click-where is volume and why in hell would flash ever want use of my non existant camera anyway? WTF is up with that? Are these people just on ludes or what??? Where is a real control panel?
Oh well, thanks adobe but no thanks, flashblock still stays on and activated. YouTube, big fat waste as well. At least googlevids let's you choose a normal
I can't figure it out, what exactly is flash *for* anyway?? I have never even seen any example where it was all that useful for any purpose and seems a huge waste and I know it's a resource hog, seen it take over my browser before with just a few tabs and some flash ads running before I had flashblock installed. All it takes is a few to grind my machine with half a gig RAM to a halt.
Flash! The Curb Feelers of the Internets Toobz! Version 9 Now with Improved Chrome Plating!
Flash is the only program I can truthfully say I hope is *never* open sourced. I guarantee you it has too many cooties for "safe source" viewing.
produ3t, TBSD's
I wonder how far Linus would have gotten if he had found so many ways to free up his time.
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!
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?
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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
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!'
Heh, see, even Linus has gone Agile. New-wave 2.0 web developers rejoice! :-)
Woo Hoo 2.8 here we come.. err ummm.. McFry's anyone?
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
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.
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.