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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."
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.
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."
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.
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
Difference is:
Corporation - We should lay off half the workforce, that would save us so much money.
[6 months later]
Corporation - Why is productivity so low?
Linus - Lets get/keep things working
[6 months later]
Linus - Lets get/keep things working
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."
Linux isn't a corporation. Also, for something as specific as an OS kernel, I'm not sure there's much to be said for looking out in a detailed manner more than a few major iterations in advance. Sure, there are probably features being considered all the time, but that doesn't make them a focus.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
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!”
Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn.
Correction:
Torvalds is a Swedish-speaking Finn.
(You forgot a hyphen.)
I think when people are talking about corporations being shortsighted, they aren't talking about corporations failing to plan ahead, they are talking about corporations taking actions that clearly damage their own future potential. Linus taking Linux day by day, or in 6-month sprints, or whatever, isn't really the same thing because that doesn't hinder Linux's ability to compete. At worst, it helps it sub-optimally. This as opposed to killing your most profitable product line, or laying off the people who work on your next product instead of the people who sell last year's product, etc..
It would surprise me though if he doesn't have at least some long-term goals that take over 6 months to complete and that he's not focussed on working on right now but has in his back-pocket, but maybe he really doesn't.
I also think the statement about corporate shortsightedness is somewhat overused, although not entirely without merit. When somebody says something like that, I sometimes click on their posting history to see if they also make claims like "big Pharma will never release cures because palliative care is more profitable" and the like to help me determine if they're logically consistent and therefore might be worth paying attention to, or just reflexively take anti-corporate positions (likewise for pro-corporate positions). And yes, I know they could believe that all corporations *except* big Pharma are short-sighted.
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.
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."
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
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.)