Linus Torvalds Speaks Out on Future of Linux

SlinkySausage writes "Linus Torvalds has laid out his plans for the future of Linux, including the 3.0 kernel [there probably won't be one], problems with the Linux release cycles and which distro he personally runs on his home PC. '"Compile everything by hand" ones simply weren't interesting to me,' Torvalds says."

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[Anonymous Coward]

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has, along with others like Richard Stallman, literally changed the world of software forever.

Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world's mission critical server infrastructures.

The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?

I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges.

APC: Writing an operating system kernel is a hard job. Why did you write Linux in the first place?

LT: Kernels may be hard, but partly because of that they are also interesting. I've always been more interested in "down to the hardware" details than in fluffy stuff like user interfaces etc, and an operating system kernel is about as down to the hardware as you can get without actually building it yourself (which I've also done - I was at a CPU company for seven years, after all). So I'm not into soldering irons etc, but I very much enjoy working at a low level, and thinking about how my software actually interacts with the CPU and other parts of the system. Besides, I really didn't realize how hard it would be. I really never expected to be still working on it 15+ years later ;)

APC: What's the Linux Foundation?

LT: Heh. I just work here, you should ask some of the people who are actually involved in all the other things that LF does. It's basically the combination of OSDL ("Open Source Development Labs") and FSG ("Free Standards Group"), and is a vendor-neutral place for different organizations to discuss the issues they have, and trying to help Linux along. Part of what LF does is pay me to maintain the kernel.

APC: What are you doing with the kernel now? Are you working on it full time? What parts of it do you work on the most?

LT: I very much work on it full time, but I no longer really work on any particular "part"of it - I end up spending almost all my time on not writing kernel code myself, but on working with the flow of code and merging it all.

In fact, the biggest amount of actual source code I've written in the last two years is not in the kernel itself, but in the tool I use to just track the kernel development (called "git" - a source control management system).

So I still get to write code (and I send out suggested patches quite often - but usually they are along the lines of "so here's how we could handle this issue..." in order to prod others to actually do the final patch and testing). But what I do a lot more is go through other peoples changes and say "yes" or "no".

APC: The 2.6 series kernel has been around for a long time. Why?

LT: We used to have these big and painful development releases that took several years, and it worked reasonably well and people got very used to it ("2. is stable, 2. is development"), but it had serious downsides too.

In particular, the release cycles were so long that all the commercial vendors effectively had to back-port a fair amount of new code from the development kernels, and so development code ended up in the stable releases. Also, conversely, the vendors fixed problems in the stable versions, and sometimes the fixes were missed or weren't easy to then forward-port to the development series, because the two were just very far apart.

Basically, a multi-year development cycle simply doesn't work. It was reasonable and required for a while (we did some pretty radical changes there too), but with 2.6, the base kernel is in good shape, and we've improved our development process enough that we just don

Re:Is Linus too much of a nerd?

[pete-classic]

I am thinking that his love for writing low level code is something of a failure of what will allow Linux to come into the mainstream.

And that is, getting the GUI perfected[. . .]

Linux doesn't have a GUI, dude. You should read about Linux more, and write about it less.

Linus is the creator of, and remains deeply involved with the development of the Linux operating system kernel. "The GUI" isn't his concern. (Though providing the underlying services to support it is.)

Also, I don't think Linus much cares about Linux being "mainstream". He just wants it to be the best!

-Peter

Re:Not a Gentoo user

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

"Run a compiled KDE/OpenOffice system from gentoo with the appropriate flags for your CPU in make.conf

Compare the performance to the pre-compiled Gentoo, Fedora, or Ubuntu performance

The taste (err, performance) is a lot better with the compiled yourself. And you don't get asked 40-50 questions, or if you do, you forgot to set batch mode."

I call that BS.

binary packages perform as well as any self compiled code out there. i had the same discussion a couple of years ago, when gentoo was all the rage. i went home, dowloaded the source code of both Glibc and GCC and ran a series of kernel compilations first with Debian's i686 optimized packages of both Glibc and GCC, then ran the same tests this time with athlon optimized packages (my CPU at the time was an athlon Tbird running at 1.4 GHZ). The result was a statiscaly negligible 1% (yes, ONE percent) in favor of the athlon optimized code.

You know why such small diference ? it's because modern CPUs are capable of optimizing the code internally themselves. Anandtech and tom's hardware have lots of articles about how this kind of stuff happens. the point being that you can run pentium-optimized code in an athlon or AMD64 optimized code in an intel 64bit Core 2 without loss of performance.

in other words: compiling the code yourself to get better performance is (in the best penn jillette style) BULLSHIT!!!

Oh, and there's another thing. as a professional syadmin, I always favor vendor compiled packages for stability and support. try convincing a middle manager of a fortune 100 company about the advantages of self compiled code, and he'll be glad to staple a copy of their site-support contract with Sun/IBM/HP/Red Hat/whatever to your pink slip.

big companies loathe this kind of adventure with the code that runs their business. whith their asses on the line, they want someone to fix any mistake quickly and efficiently (and binary packages are waaaay quicker than compiling), and if it doesn't work, they want some external party to blame and pay contractual fees.

welcome to the real word, kid.

Re:Not a Gentoo user

[michrech]

"cat /proc/cpuinfo"

Tells you *everything* you want to know (possibly even MORE than you wanted to know).

I doubt it, Windows seems to know what type of CPU I have when I go to 'my computer'. When I was using my AMD system I knew that it was a K6 processor type, and I downloaded the appropriate kernel/binaries for it though, surely it's not that difficult to do a bit of googling to find out what processor you have?

Re:I want collapsable threads!

[Eponymous Bastard]

Use the new discussion system (D2?) and click on the title of the comment. It collapses and hides all its descendants.

Works for me.