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Linus Torvalds Isn't Looking 10 Years Ahead For Linux and That's OK
darthcamaro writes: At the Linuxcon conference in Seattle today, Linus Torvalds responded to questions about Linux security and about the next 10 years of Linux. For security, Torvalds isn't too worried as he sees it just being about dealing with bugs. When it comes to having a roadmap he's not worried either as he just leaves that to others. "I'm a very plodding, pedestrian person and look only about six months ahead," Torvalds said. "I look at the current release and the next one, as I don't think planning 10 years ahead is sane."
Systemd
If you actually read TFA you see a little bit of nostalgia from Linus about how lean the kernel used to be and how modern Linux may be a little too bloated for some IoT applications. The truth is that Linux can certainly be less bloated that a full desktop Windows 10 installation, but it is nowhere near as lean as it used to be. Not much of an issue in larger hardware where even smartphones have more power than powerful desktops did 15 years ago, but there are definitely areas where the modern Linux kernel is a little too big for its own good.
How dare you to insult the great benevolent dictator! He is the first king of the lkml!
I thought that was going to happen "this year".
remove nospam. to email!
Desktop is so last millennium.
The driver ABI is unstable by design.
Open-source your driver, and you won't have to worry about it: the kernel team will maintain it for you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Isn't this what everyone says is the problem with American corporations?
Linus Torvalds has no vision of the future. Linux doomed.
As much as 'Linux' keeps being dragged into assorted rambling-think-pieces as though it were a direct analog to the OS-and-also-a-big-suite-of-hardware-software-and-'cloud'-service-offerings referred to as 'Windows' and 'Apple' or 'OSX'; 'Linux', so far as it is Linus' problem, is a kernel. It's also a kernel that has succeeded largely on the basis of being widely supported, reasonably flexible(with greater flexibility available to those willing to do additional heavy lifting themselves), and an inexpensive implementation of mostly-unix-like behavior.
That's not a role 100% free of strategic considerations(like the current 'beating on the ARM vendors to un-fuck the current fragmented hellhole of disjointed BSPs and embrace sanity' initiative); but it is one where "ensure continued cooperation among interested users and hardware vendors, integrate promising out-of-tree developments as demand and maturity suggest" is more or less the best strategy to take. It's not as though it would even be meaningful for an OS to "Embrace a cloud services strategy", since that happens at a different level of the stack entirely; and to the degree that OS development does need, and do, blue-sky cool-new-architecture-from-the-ground-up; that isn't exactly mainline Linux's problem; and Linux probably isn't even an obvious starting point(if your bold new OS concept makes use of some sort of exotic hardware capabilities, you'll presumably be prototyping on FPGAs or the ASICs you are developing in tandem with the OS; if it is designed to work with mostly standard hardware; but do some part of being an OS differently, you can develop against a delightfully small and stable collection of 'hardware' thanks to VMs.
Really? And how do they test this for me? Okay, so maybe I donate hardware. Do I really trust these guys to keep using it and really really test it?
It's an argument that doesn't really work
Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. That's why he says "planning 10 years ahead is not sane". The Swedish word is "klok" which can be translated as "sane" or, more reasonably.... "sensible."
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Desktop is so last millennium.
only to dumfucks jizzing all over their iTablets.
If you see it broken you submit a bug and wait for fix.
That AC could have been a hindu for all you know, so don't accuse him of making an insult.
Really? And how do they test this for me? Okay, so maybe I donate hardware. Do I really trust these guys to keep using it and really really test it?
Maybe they'll miss something, and there will be a bug. That's going to be a problem if you try it yourself, too, except no one on the kernel team will even attempt to keep it updated.
The problem you were asking about was the unstable ABI. That problem is a solved problem, as explained in the earlier post.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And where is ReiserFS now? If only Hans had done more planning and been less impulsive, his wife and his project might both be alive right now.
Well, if you're building Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or even the Brooklyn Bridge, you might want to reconsider that thought..
Linux, on the other hand, can get along by just 'evolving' via the natural process of bickering...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The driver ABI is unstable by design.
Open-source your driver, and you won't have to worry about it: the kernel team will maintain it for you.
Aaaaaand THAT is why Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM mainframes still live.
Seriously, who gives a flying fuck any more what Linus thinks? He's been somewhere between indifferent and openly hostile toward usability issues for years, and all the important work on a Linux distribution, in terms of making it more appealing to mainstream computer users, happens well outside the kernel.
If this article said that the heads of GNOME, KDE, etc. weren't looking 10 years ahead, then it would be much more newsworthy (and troubling).
To be honest, a better translation, especially in this context, would be "smart" or "wise".
Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn.
Correction:
Torvalds is a Swedish-speaking Finn.
(You forgot a hyphen.)
Being a tactical is a natural trait of smart logic people like Linus. You can see this behavior in his emails/posts.
Being a architect, road map visionary is daunting to those personalities. Too much [mind] work for a research for instance. From his comments, just be happy Linus knows himself.
Actually yes. Knowing that my RAID card will work on Solaris even after I upgrade it is a reason why I still use it.
Pretty much all Outlook viruses were design issues, not bugs. They designed a mail system which, on a OS where files were executable by extension, attachments from unverifiable senders had their extension hidden so you didn't know it was an executable.
This was baked in design. It wasn't an execution bug.
There are entire classes of bugs you could get rid of by certain design choices. Address space layout randomization helps a lot. W ^ X, or if you can write to memory, you can't execute it. These are not infallible (there's lots of webpages on how to get past ASLR) but if we design these things as more secure, we will be more secure.
If the ABI was stable, they'd be stuck with supporting crappy, crusty old crappy crap that some crappy old closed-source driver for some crappy old hardware requires, and unable to rewrite the kernel to provide similar functionality in a better manner.
Like Windows.
It's well-known who that AC is, as he forgot to click Anonymous a few weeks ago.
Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. That's why he says "planning 10 years ahead is not sane". The Swedish word is "klok" which can be translated as "sane" or, more reasonably.... "sensible."
Linus Torvalds has pretty thoroughly mastered English. I'm sure he said "sane" and meant "sane", with full appreciation of the meaning and overtones of the word and of the alternatives he could have chosen.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What about drivers that require $100000 worth of test equipment and an electrical engineer to test?
What about drivers that require $100000 worth of test equipment and an electrical engineer to test?
In that case, you'll probably want to test it yourself if there are any code changes. But by putting it in the kernel mainline, you won't have to worry about ABI bugs anymore.
btw, with super-expensive hardware like that, the vendor usually manages the OS and upgrades, so the unstable ABI is not really an issue.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In the future Linux will be spelled Lennart.
It's too big to booting off floppy disks now, but that is very rarely an issue these days.
It's still small enough to run on an Nintendo DS FFS!
So I'm curious - where are those areas? Don't hint, give an example or several (since there are apparently "areas") and let us see if it's as ignorable as the problem of not being able to boot it from a floppy disk anymore.
By the textbook definition the OS is the kernel and the software distribution has all the userspace stuff. By the "beige box is the hard drive" definition the software distribution is the OS - the definition the Judge threw out as stupid in MS vs Netscape but has gained traction since.
So the OS can have drivers to handle hardware used for accessibility and the software distribution can have applications that take use of them.
The Solitaire game isn't part of the OS FFS.
maybe he isn't american and therefore doesn't hyphenate everything
What you really mean is that it's Torvald's choice and it's one driven mostly by arrogance. Torvalds isn't infallible.
No, I agree with the decision for both technical and ideological reasons.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's worked out very well for companies that have gone that route.
In all the time after Linus had been nodding, while verbally answering "no", on question if he had been contacted by authorities, I have disliked him for having goofed about something as serious as direct interference from a state authority and I don't trust the man.
Maybe if you were to ask if he ever colluded with the NSA, he would both nod and answer no.
maybe he isn't american and therefore doesn't hyphenate everything
Wow, I was not aware that this was a stereotype about Americans. You learn something every day.
But so be it. My countrymen! There is a plague in America today. For too long have we harbored it in our very bosom! I speak, of course, of the plague of over-hyphenation! Only through far-reaching long-enduring hyper-vigilance shall eradicate this thrice-cursed word-sickness!
(Oh, also, I think there've been reports of actual plague in Yosemite National Park recently, so maybe watch out for that as well.)
If the ABI was stable in some form, v1, v2 etc you could at least develop a translation layer to keep old hardware working.
And why would you do that instead of moving the driver for that old hardware into the kernel? And for that matter, given how much old hardware is abandoned in newer versions of Windows, who do you expect would actually do this?
Would you? If so, why?
Linus Torvalds have said that "Linux has no design and never will have". Linus says that trial and error in evolution has brought Homo Sapiens, the supreme species. And if trial and error has brought us humans, then that is good enough for Linux too. And that is why there are large parts in Linux rewritten all the time, slowly evolving Linux to a superior design beating all other operating systems. This is why Linus Torvalds does not look ahead more than the next release, because he expects Linux to have large parts redesigned then. And that is why the driver ABI is unstable, because it has no design and never will have. That is also why Linux Torvalds some time ago discussed whether a release should just be clean up of the code, because of the bloat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux#Kernel_criticisms
Personally, I think Linus Torvalds has that much knowledge now to make a good design (freezing ABI etc) now. So he should do it. All other OSes have stable ABIs except Linux. Linux has some 150.000+ drivers and a couple of 100 drivers released every week. There are only so many Linux developers, so they will never be able to update all of them when Torvalds changes the ABI in the kernel. This is a problem I think, as even largest OEM on the planet have trouble supporting Linux on their hardware because of unstable ABI. That must be fixed if Linux is to conquer the desktop. The driver model is broken.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1530558/ubuntu-broken-dell-inspiron-mini
What do you want one for? Please cite an example of a current closed source driver you're maintaining on linux.
I was thinking about drivers that are not open. A bit like how you can use Windows NDIS driver on Linux. Ideally I'd like this for Android so all OEM camera, sensor and GPS drivers etc follow one ABI so you can upgrade your phone without waiting for anyone to make custom ROMs.