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Linus Torvalds Will Answer Your Questions
Linus Torvalds was (and still is) the primary force behind the development of the Linux kernel, and since you are reading Slashdot, you already knew that. Mr. Torvalds has agreed to answer any questions you may have about the direction of software, his thoughts on politics, winning the Millenial Technology Prize, or anything else. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please keep them to one per post. We'll send the best to Linus, and post his answers when we get them back. Remember to keep an eye out for the rest of our upcoming special interviews this month.
In 2007 you made some rather polarizing remarks about C++. Coincidentally, Slashdot absolutely loves language wars and I seem to only find evidence that you use C based on the lack of malice and contempt I can find you publicizing on it. Do you find anything terrible about C? Conversely, do you have anything nice to say bout C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, Lisp, Prolog, Microsoft's languages or any other language you feel particularly vehement about at the moment?
My work here is dung.
Despite your accomplishments and some of your public comments about the dire state of American politics, you remain a resident of the United States of America. Clearly you have the clout to live where you please, why do you continue to reside in the United States? Assuming your answer is simply "work", if there was one thing you could change in the United States what would it be and are you doing anything to move toward that accomplishment (aside from procreating and trying to help us out that way)?
My work here is dung.
I spend some time designing things in Verilog and trying to read other people's source code at opencores.org, and I recall you did some work at Transmeta. For some time I've had a list of instructions that could be added to processsors that would be drastically speed up common functions, and SSE 4.2 includes some of my favorites, the dqword string comparision instructions. So...
What are your ideas for instrructions that you've always thought should be handled by the processor, but never seen implemented?
As a software developer, I have a coveted collection of books. A few of said tomes -- both fiction and non -- have fundamentally altered the course of my life. Assuming yours aren't just man pages and .txt files, what are they?
My work here is dung.
Describe the end of the Linux kernel. Symbolically and/or literally, your choice.
My work here is dung.
Hi Linus! Thanks for everything!
How has getting older and raising a family changed the way you look at kernel work and programming in general? Do you see yourself still being involved in the kernel in 20 years? Do you ever just want to take a break for a few years, or do you feel like your time working on the kernel is a rest from the real world?
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Why do you think Linux has been able to (mostly) avoid the fragmentation that plagued the competing Unixes of the 1980's? What would you say helps keep Linux a unified project rather than more forked system like BSD?
I am officially gone from
PS: Thank you for everything you've done, and continue to do (the world is actually full of heroes but the vast majority of them - at least in this day and age - have limited spheres of influence. You on the other hand...) ;)
What is his stance on the subject today and why did he allow them in the first place? When will he kick them out?
What frustrates you most in the GNU/Linux ecosystem?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
What would you ask to Richard Stallman if you had to interview him? :)
Hi, Linus. Thank you for your amazing work! I'm wondering what you think the big challenges will be in OS design for the next 20 years.
It's been over twenty years since the inception of Linux. With 20/20 hindsight, what you have done differently if you had had today's knowledge and experience back in the early days?
If you could give one piece of technical advice and one piece of non-technical advice to students seeking a technical career and/or early-career tech professionals, what would it be?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What is the coolest thing that you have heard of people doing with Linux recently?
Has there ever been a time in the development of the Linux Kernel where you've wished you'd gone the Hurd-style micro-kernel route espoused by the like of Tannenbaum, or do you feel that from an architectural standpoint Linux has benefitted from having a monolithic design?
Linux has been massively more successful than Hurd, but I wonder how much of that is down to intrinsic technical superiority of its approach, and how much to the lack of a central driving force supported by a community of committed developers? It always seemed like the Hurd model should have allowed more people to be involved, but that has never seemed to be the case.
Paul Leader
What question was not asked or not transmitted to you and you'd really wish it was so that you can answer it ?
If you had to do GIT over again, what, if anything, would you change?
VERY closely related question, do you like the git-flow project and would you think about pulling that into mainline or not?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What is your current opinion on Android? Do you consider Android as a "Linux", "Linux type" or "Linux child"? Are you connected somehow with Android development?
Linus: What's your tool of choice for giving eldavojohn the severe beatdown he deserves?
I asked a bunch of hard architecture questions, now for a softball Q. Your favorite hack WRT kernel internals and kernel programming in general. drivers, innards, I don't care which. The kind of thing where you took a look at the code and go 'holy cow thats cool' or whatever. You define favorite, hack, and kernel. Just wanting to kick back and hear a story about cool code.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You were 'forced' to start working on Git as a result of Jeremy Allison's reverse engineering of the BitKeeper protocol and Larry McVoy's hostile reaction.
At first you weren't too enchanted about the waste of time having to write your own DVSC system from scratch for lack of acceptable alternatives. I remember you complaining about that work preventing you to progress on the kernel.
Now Git is becoming the de-facto tool for source control management in most F/OSS communities and inside companies. That's another very successful project you fathered, and while I guess Mercurial or other projects would have existed anyway, the usage of Git on the kernel has demonstrated its reliability and its performance and traction have made DVCS'es gain visibility and market in no time.
Here come the questions:
* Are there any features you still miss from BK?
* As a happy Git user, I thank Jeremy Allison for his refusal to accept compromise and his tentative to create a Free BK client and I thank you for your refusal to accept a technically inferior/ill-suited solution like SVN. How do you reflect on this?
The Linux kernel has now been developed for more than 20 years, and is in ways now part of "the establishment" since it now runs on everything from consumer televisions to mass-marketed phones.
If you could start something entirely new, or go back and do it all over again, what would you do? You've made comments in the past about disliking visualization, since getting close to the hardware was what attracted you to the kernel. So this question is largely about what you see as the next radical change at the kernel level might happen over the next 20 years, if anything.
AccountKiller
Tell me how can we defeat UEFI and 'Windows Only' ARM devices?
You must of been burned out on Linux kernel development multiple-times over by now... how do you deal with it?
That sounds like a question more for Perens than for Torvalds.
My question for Torvalds would be thus: Now that all mainstream OSes other than yours, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, have a stable ABI to help make sure that drivers continue to work why do you think your way is better than all those other OSes? How can the kernel devs do QA and QC for tens of thousands of drivers when there are so few of you, so many drivers, and such a hectic release schedule? Why is an ABI such a bad thing when it seems to work for everybody else? If it is because you hope to use lack of an ABI to force drivers to be open what do you say to the fact that the most stable graphics driver in Linux is Nvidia, who is closed?
If you are gonna ask the man questions don't play pattycake and throw softballs, give him the hard ones. While I'm sure to be modded down for asking the hard questions and I doubt anybody would have had the guts to ask him I for one would have liked to have seen if he had a truly legitimate answer or if it would have boiled down to dogma or "If things are stable then i can't tweak all I want" instead of having a legitimate programming reason why he thinks his design is better than everyone else on the planet.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Kind of a political question: I've always wanted to ask if you think your life would have gone differently had you grown up in the U.S. with similar means. Are there things about life in Finland (politically, socially, economically) that you feel made it more or less possible for you to pursue your interests and eventually develop an O.S. kernel?
Do you keep a to-do list on paper, on a computer, or do something else?