Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds' opinions regarding the GPL
Linus Torvalds has an uncomfortable pause at 44:24 in this video. The uncomfortable pause occurs when he concludes a confused critique of the GNU General Public License.
2.6.26-rc8, "A Pretty Small Set Of Changes"
"It hasn't been a week, I know, and this is a pretty small set of changes since -rc7, but I'm going to be mostly incommunicado for the next week or so, so I just released what will hopefully be the last -rc," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc8 kernel. He added, "or maybe not. It depends on how good you all are while I'm not looking." Regarding the latest release candidate, Linus explained:
"Most of the bulk of the changes here are to Xen and to KVM in particular, which shows up as a rather unusual dirstat: 65% is in arch/x86 (counting the asm-x86 changes too). The rest is mostly random stuff, the appended ShortLog gives a reasonable idea. Several bugzilla entries are hopefully now closed."
The Origins of Linux - Linus Torvalds [video]
Linus Torvalds, the creator of the [Linux kernel], tells the story of how he went from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon for open source software by the end of the decade.
2.6.26-rc7, "Mainly Drivers And Arch Updates"
"Another week, another -rc," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc7 Linux kernel, "and as usual, it's mainly drivers and arch updates - over 90% of changes are in one or the other." He continued:
"A big part of it (about two thirds of the driver update, in fact) is a late-dropping AGP/DRM update that adds support for some new Intel and ATI graphics cards. And a big part of the arch update is the inevitable def_config updates, of course. I'm not all that happy about the timing of the support for the new cards, but at the same time I also hate delaying new drivers. Obviously the hope is that it can't cause any regressions, since the added code is almost entirely for stuff that simply wasn't supported at all before."
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Compiler Oops
"In the kerneloops.org stats, a new oops is rapidly climbing the charts, began Arjan van de Ven, referring to his website where he automatically collects kernel oops and warning reports from mailing lists, bugzillas, and a special client. Regarding the latest oops, he noted, "the oops is a page fault in the ext3 'do_slit' function, and the first report of it was with 2.6.26-rc6-git3." Linux creator Linus Torvalds took a quick interest in the issue, observing that all the oopses seemed to be on the i686 architecture, suggesting, "could this perhaps be an indication that it is specific to i686 some way (eg a compiler issue?)"
GNewSense, the Present and the Future
"You would think that a GNU/Linux distribution dedicated to shipping only free software would be uncontroversial. After all, isn't free software what GNU/Linux is all about? Yet, when the latest version of GNewSense was announced recently, Slashdot readers were divided in their reactions..."
The 10 Best Linus Torvalds Quotes
1. “Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.”
2. “Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.”
2.6.26-rc5, "Another Batch Of Mostly Pretty Small Fixes"
"Another week, another batch of mostly pretty small fixes. Hopefully the regression list is shrinking, and we've fixed at least a couple of the oopses on Arjan's list," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc5 kernel. He added, "as usual, the bulk of the changes are in drivers and arch code - together they are about 70% of the diffstat. And the arch stats are bloated by some new/updated SH and avr defconfig files, which is also fairly common at this stage." Linus concluded:
"Perhaps unusually, 13% is in kernel/, almost all of it fixing up some scheduler issues - with the bulk of it by far being a couple of reverts due to performance regressions. But there's a few other fixes too. And then there is networking and some ocfs2 updates. Along with various one-liners sprinkled all around.
"The shortlog (appended) gives a reasonable view of it all. Nothing hugely exciting sticks to my mind, but then I don't think we've had any really hugely exciting problem spots either.."
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2.6.26-rc4, "Things Are Calming Down"
"You know the drill by now: another week, another -rc," began Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc4 kernel. "There's a lot of small stuff in here", he continued, "most people won't even notice. The most noticeable thing is for all you 32-bit x86 people who use PAE (enabled by the HIGHMEM64G config option) due to having too much memory in your machine - mprotect() was broken due to some of the PAT fix/cleanup patches, causing the NX bit to be not set correctly." Linus described the fixed bug:
"If you had PAE enabled _and_ a recent enough CPU to have NX, but not recent enough to be 64-bit (or you were just perverse and wanted to run a 32-bit kernel despite having a chip that could do 64-bit and enough memory that you _really_ should have used a 64-bit kernel), you'd get various random program failures with SIGSEGV. It ranged from X not starting up to apparently OpenOffice not working if it did."
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"Pay attention to your freedom instead of self-serving forecasts" - RMS speaks with Poornam Media
RMS: «If Microsoft says that ['era of open computing'], it appears to be an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophesy. If people believe it, they may make it come true. The way to deal with that is to refuse to let Microsoft lead you. Pay attention to your freedom instead of self-serving forecasts ...
Git Management
"Is there a write up of what you consider the 'proper' git workflow?" Theodore Ts'o asked Linux creator Linus Torvalds, "why do you consider rebasing topic branches a bad thing?" Linus replied, "rebasing branches is absolutely not a bad thing for individual developers. But it *is* a bad thing for a subsystem maintainer." He went on to differentiate between 'grunts' who write the code and 'managers' who primarily collect other people's code, "a grunt should use 'git rebase' to keep his own work in line. A technical manager, while he hopefully does some useful work on his own, should strive to make _others_ do as much work as possible, and then 'git rebase' is the wrong thing, because it will always make it harder for the people around you to track your tree and to help you update your tree." Linus compared his own patch management style and productivity from over six years ago before he started using BK and git, to his current style using git:
2.6.26-rc3, "Another Week, Another -rc Release"
"This time around, we have 60+% of the changes in drivers, notably drives/video and drivers/media, with some infiniband, networking and usb lovin' to fill things out," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc3 kernel. "The rest is (as usual) mostly arch updates," he continued, "this time mostly mips, m68k and uml." Linus noticed that Linux kernel development has been managed with git now as long as it was managed with BitKeeper, a little over three years for both tools. He explained, "the most striking difference has nothing to do with git or BK (the switch-over timing was just the reason I decided to take a look), but with the fact that we're not just continuing to develop, but we're developing faster and with more people," adding:
2.6.23-rc3, "Another Week, Another -rc Release"
"This time around, we have 60+% of the changes in drivers, notably drives/video and drivers/media, with some infiniband, networking and usb lovin' to fill things out," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.23-rc3 kernel. "The rest is (as usual) mostly arch updates," he continued, "this time mostly mips, m68k and uml." Linus noticed that Linux kernel development has been managed with git now as long as it was managed with BitKeeper, a little over three years for both tools. He explained, "the most striking difference has nothing to do with git or BK (the switch-over timing was just the reason I decided to take a look), but with the fact that we're not just continuing to develop, but we're developing faster and with more people," adding:
Removing the Big Kernel Lock
"As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptible BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptible code again. This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence," began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL. Ingo explained:
"This task is not easy at all. 12 years after Linux has been converted to an SMP OS we still have 1300+ legacy BKL using sites. There are 400+ lock_kernel() critical sections and 800+ ioctls. They are spread out across rather difficult areas of often legacy code that few people understand and few people dare to touch. It takes top people like Alan Cox to map the semantics and to remove BKL code, and even for Alan (who is doing this for the TTY code) it is a long and difficult task."
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2.6.26-rc2, "Little Exciting Here"
"About 45% architecture updates (counting the include files too), about 30% drivers, and about 25% odds-and-ends. The odds-and-ends are mainly Documentation, filesystems (mostly cifs) and core kernel (scheduler updates etc)," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc2 kernel. He added, "if you read the shortlog and get the feeling that most of it is pretty boring small details, you'd be right. There is little exciting there." He continued:
"A fairly small part of it, but quite possibly the most noticeable one, is how the semaphore changes impacted the BKL (the old 'big kernel lock' that is still used for some legacy code, for you non-core people out there), which in the past had different versions ('regular', 'preemptable'). A few months ago we dropped the regular BKL version, but in 2.6.25-rc1 we then had performance (and then correctness) issues with the interaction between the semaphore implementation and the preemptable BKL, so we're back to the old regular version for now."
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