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Torvalds on Where Linux is Headed in 2008
Stony Stevenson writes "In an interview at the ITNews site, Linus Torvalds lays out his current excitement about the future of Linux. Torvalds is looking forward to hardware elements like solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualisation despite his personal lack of interest in the area. 'When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can't fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity's sense of the market. It doesn't matter how competent Microsoft — or any individual company — is, it's going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn't even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility.'"
Not strictly true...
The same Linux kernel, admittedly often configured in different ways and with different userland apps, runs on all these devices...
The mobile versions of windows are completely different, and have very little in common with the desktop and server versions.
I have a Nokia N800, which runs an embedded linux, i can compile all the same programs i use on my desktop linux machines. Even if you have the source, it's not easy to just recompile a windows program to run on windows mobile, and most programs dont come with source anyway.
As for supercomputers, windows is pretty laughable in this area, it's only used in fairly low end clusters and is horribly inefficient (all your cluster nodes need a videocard and local hd?), most of the serious supercomputers are running linux these days. As for performance, last time i saw a windows cluster in the top500 it consisted of 660 2.8ghz dual cpu dell poweredge servers, a machine using 600 dual cpu 2.8ghz poweredge servers of the same model and running linux was 50 places higher.
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There is a new 80211 stack in Linux with better structure that allows easier creation of device drivers. This makes it easier for manufactures to create drivers, like the one who designed your card. For those manufacturers that do not bother, like the one who made your card, it also makes it a tiny bit easier for enthusiasts to step in.
I hope that makes it clear for you.
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I haven't been able to find information on the smallest Windows CE system, but Linux has been stuffed on a wristwatch with only 19MHz of CPU power and 8M of RAM.
So I guess Linus' point is that Linux runs a greater range of systems, from the top supercomputers in the world (the top ten all run Linux), to the very smallest of devices. Windows doesn't scale quite as well.
Task Manager reports anything which is backed on disc as page file usage. This means any program you run contributes, because the executable and DLLs are already on disc, and Windows treats them as if they're part of the paging file (i.e. it can drop the program or library from memory if need be, because it knows it's still on disc).
You can prove this by disabling paging altogether, and then amuse yourself by looking at how much of the "page file" is in use.
Also, Windows does aggressively page stuff out, which in theory should boost performance by making more memory available for useful things like disc caches, but in practice does annoy me a bit as well.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You can run VMware on RHEL 3, 4 and 5 without any hassle whatsoever. If you want to use proprietary software, use a stable platform like RHEL or SLES or Ubuntu LTS. The reason Ubuntu and Fedora are able to release frequently is that they do not put much effort into binary compatibility.
What you don't seem to understand is that there is no such thing as a "Linux" desktop. There are Fedora desktops and Mandriva desktops and Debian deskstops and they are all different.
Does Windows have the equivalent of an inode?
At the risk of being pedantic, files are really anchored to inodes, and that's why you can delete or copy over an in-use file. Opening the file returns the inode to the opening process. From that point, you can "replace" or "delete" the file by pointing its directory entry to a new file/inode, or deleting the directory entry. But the filesystem code keeps track of the fact that someone is still using the inode, and doesn't let its space be reclaimed until it's unused.
OTOH, this introduces a new risk, especially where people brag about their uptimes. Let's boot our machine in January, and start all of its services after it's booted. Pretend for argument that one of those services is OpenSSH, and for instance it uses libwrap.so. Now let's have a fiasco like we did about 10 years ago, where someone put a compromised tcp-wrappers out there, and assume that this machine was installed during that timeframe. (I know that would be tough, because the evil tcp-wrappers was discovered and corrected within a few days, maybe even 1.) At this point sshd has attached the bogus libwrap.so to it's process. Now let's discover the evil tcp-wrappers and replace it with a good copy. At this point, we now have a good libwrap installed. All is well, right?
Wrong. At this point, any new code that starts will get the good libwrap. But any code that has been running since before the update is still pointing to the now-anonymous inode that contains the evil libwrap.
In order to propagate a library fix, services that depend on that fix need to be restarted.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.