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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."
The development of something like a kernel NEEDS a dictator, and if Linus walks away, who is going to have the credibility and/or authority to keep a handle on it? I worry that an advisory 'board' or 'panel' would be the death by a thousand cuts that could really mess up kernel development for linux.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
Oh come on!
3.0 is a perfect excuse to break everything and allow your imagination to run riot. That's the fun bit!
Deleted
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
Personally, my favorite aspect of this interview is that Linus himself basically considers the core OS now stable enough that anything new is likely to be incremental instead of ground-shakingly different, at least on the x86 platforms.
Which would imply a stability that leads to dependability which leads to usability which leads to widespread use. At least that is my hope in the enterprise, that the combination of commodity hardware with a commodity, high powered and stable OS can be coupled with increasingly powerful database engines such as mySQL, Veritas, etc. Oracle on Linux is now considered stable as well.
At home? stability leading to dependability leading to integration leading to crossover applications that will no longer depend on a proprietary OS stack to function. The only thing missing from my desired tool set on Linux right now is basically an easy to use, high powered MIDI to music recording and notation system -- and the pieces for all of that is already there -- it's my time to research and integrate the pieces that is in short supply.
I guess my point is that stability and upgradeability cause me to buy (several Linuxes and Win2K). Give me yet a large bulkier OS that doesn't really do much but add coolness (Vista or even XP) and I yawn.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
There are no gentoo USERS. they never get to actually use the system
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
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
If stability means it's dying. As I see it, the current Linux kernel does all that it needs to, and does it quite well. There is no need to upgrade it, because to do so would be an upgrade for upgrade's sake. Anyone in IT will tell you that to upgrade simply for the sake of upgrading is stupid, and will lead to a multitude of problems. The only reason that the Linux kernel would need a version 3.x is because of a fundamentally new hardware technology. Currently, software is driving hardware development; games are written requiring advanced graphics cards. In the 90's, hardware drove software development; chip makers like Intel put out a new processor, and then software was written to take advantage of the advancements of the new chip.
Even advancements in multi-core technology would not require a 3.x series kernel (unless I'm mistaken in my belief that the 2.6.x series supports multi-core CPU's), simply because once you cam make a dual-core CPU functional with the kernel, expanding that functionality to 4, 8, or even 64 cores is simply an expanding of the current code. And even if the current kernel does not support multi-core CPU's, that would be more of a 2.8.x series, rather than an entirely new kernel version.
Anybody want my mod points?
As a Gentoo user since 1.4, I have to say that the common image is incorrect, though I know it's the common Gentoo joke.
I generally don't "compile by hand," I generally "emerge -atv (packageName)" to install or "emerge -atuvDN world" to update. Nor am I a ricer with my CFLAGS settings. It just plain works smoother than the other distributions I've used. Harp all you want to about "waiting for compiles," but I'm out doing other things while that happens. It's not as if you have to sit and watch the compiler activity scroll past. It's the computer's time being used, not mine.
Back when I was on RedHat, I'd see "package X" that wasn't part of the official distribution. So I'd find an rpm and try to install it. Then I'd find that I needed another library, and go searching for that rpm. Sometimes then things would work. But sometimes I'd find that some package was looking for things in SuSE layout instead of RedHat, or I was grabbing an rpm from somewhere that didn't play well with RedHat for some other reason. There was a non-trivial set of packages that I never could get installed and running.
On Gentoo I've had far fewer problems getting things to run. In fact, I've only had 1 intractable problem compiling from source, and that's been Doomsday, which isn't released for amd64. I've had a few transient problems with source-based packages that have soon gotten fixed. But by and large, my biggest problems have been related to binary-only packages.
Oh, and there's nothing about the usually-disruptive "upgrade to the next release." My system is just up-to-date. A few times a year they issue a new profile, but that's generally about as disruptive as upgrading any other package. The only really disruptive upgrades have been things like udev, gcc and xorg, but even with those it's better to take them one-at-a-time and cope, instead of the usual "practically everything has undergone significant changes" of a distribution upgrade.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Enough with the Vista bashing, we're sorry.
Quack, quack.
are you *sure* it was the compile flags that did that, and not some disk fragmenting or cache issues, or whatever else might have screwed your 'test'. Loading openoffice isn't exactly CPU intensive is it, and the compiled versions only have the CPU-specific extras enabled, so I can't see that having SSE3 etc enabled in your OO build v the pre-built one will cause that much of a slowdown.
Still, it's quite amazing how far we've come in the last 400 years. In the 17th Century, Kernel Development Manager was a hereditary title.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
# USE="collapsable" CFLAGS="--omg-optimize" emerge threads
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Use the new discussion system (D2?) and click on the title of the comment. It collapses and hides all its descendants.
Works for me.