The State of the Linux Kernel Panel Featuring Linus Torvalds

we've got our colonel here today and moderating is James Bottomly so if I can have the kernel folks come on out I will introduce each of you James there we go James Bottomly right thank you and we have red crow Hartman Ted show Sarah sharp you come and last but not least someone you may know leanest or Vols welcome guys come on welcome okay so arrange yourselves on these seats please no Hal Stan I wouldn't want to sit next to any of you now first things first so Jim did a fairly brief introduction so I think we want to do a slightly more interesting introduction and to do that I think you probably want to do it yourselves so what I want you to do is say who you are what you do and one fact about yourself that's hopefully interesting that probably not many people in the room know so I'll go first I'm James Bottomly I'm skuzzy subsystem maintainer and Pyrrhus maintainer and also CTO of server virtualization of parallels and the interesting thing you might not know about me is that contrary to my effort tool and sartorial elegance this event if you ever actually run into me anywhere near my home in London you'll find me in a pair of shorts with no shoes so I think next one up is surliness so I'm leanness there is absolutely nothing interesting about me I have to figure that out you know yeah now if you're running into my home I'll be in a bath ratty bathrobe reading email that's what I do I read email I ask for emails the months I think are worth answering and I merge code written by others I have not written my own code in the last five years as far as I can tell great I'm Greg Hartmann I'm a Linux Foundation I'm a kernel developer I do lots of things there one thing I don't know when I started the Linux Foundation Jim told me there was one rule and that was you have to shower by 11 o'clock and my family is very appreciative without riverwalk sera so I'm Sarah sharp I'm the USB 3 driver maintainer and one interesting fact about me I like to automate my garden watering system with Arduino ok my name is Ted chaough I am the ext4 filesystem maintainer and I work at Google working on file systems and storage and well why don't you think fact that I guess a number of folks here may have noticed is that I've lost a little bit of weight and although everyone keeps joking about the fact that I deserve a commission from Fitbit because I seem to have been pushing that a lot that I've actually also been hitting the gym a lot so I've become a bit of a gym rat well congratulations I believe Lemus was just pointing out that you transferred most the way to him rather than so for the audience this is supposed to be interactive there should be microphones I can't see them but they're somewhere in the hall and you should be able to find them because I'm not gonna stand up here 45 minutes making up all of the questions although since Twitter joined the Linux Foundation I decided that I would actually try and join Twitter so I did put out a tweet asking for people to submit questions and the wonderful thing about that is I got a hundred new friends and precisely for questions so I think we'll begin with something that my predecessor on this John Corbett who unfortunately couldn't be here for personal reasons today usually asks which is the aging maintainer x' problem and this time in order to demonstrate that we're not a load of grey bird of fuddy-duddies we actually have Sarah on the panel here to represent youth and so I think I'm actually going to turn the question around and ask Sarah as someone who's not one of the aging original maintainer x' tell us what some of the problems we have attracting youth is and how we should go about fixing you know it's it's now you're talking Linux or kernels specifically I'm talking Linux I'm Colonel specific whichever one you'd like I I think that there's some misconceptions about the kernel community and you know I think that for younger people sometimes they may not think that the Linux kernel is sexy particularly but with you know Android and tablets and phones I think that that's kind of become more of an interest and I think that some people have the misconception that we yell at each other all the time and there's there's fights going on but I think it depends on which mailing list you're actually on if you're gonna send something stupid LK Melvin yeah you might get yelled at but if you send you know useful things then usually it's constructive criticism I find but I think too that it's difficult to get new people involved and so I've been sort of toying around with the idea of starting more of a sort of mentorship program so if you're interested in that talk with me afterwards and and we'll see if we can get some more younger people involved so if I maze what was the first thing that got you interested in Linux well the first thing that got me interested in Linux was that my professor was actually already involved in the open-source community in Portland and so he actually dragged me to some Linux kernel bearings and so I got to know more of the community and then Greg approached Bart and said hey I've got this project do you have a student and it was USB fs2 which has never been published but got me in so I think that maybe we need more of a mentor relationship and and projects that can get people in okay so lean us who you going to mentor yeah no I don't think you want to scare away even more young people but do you think the idea of mentoring people is a good one I you can't say no to that question exactly so do that you said that I know sucks let's never mentor anybody yeah I I think different people just come in to the community from different sources and I mean clearly universities have always been one source of a lot of kernel developers I also think it's slightly unfair at every kernel summit point to all of us that the kernel summit is saying you're getting old and gray the fact is the people who come to the kernel summit are maybe not representative of most of the developers we end up seeing a lot of the maintainer x' who often have been around for a long time for obvious reasons and i I do think that the developers are not necessarily always always getting old at the same rate we are so if I may synthesize that we shouldn't invite our friends to the kernel summit we should invite people who actually do the work I think it might be interesting if there are like driver of writers who really are generating a lot of code and getting some of the new new kids really to come to these things yes absolutely okay anyway either of you two have any comments on this no you said it all last year and the year before and the year before that all right so there's 3,000 people contribute to the Linux kernel last year okay and there's 85 of us here in one room and 70 of us or 50 of us were probably here for the past 10 years so I mean you can't really there are new people coming in and new people doing good stuff but it's it's a little unfair but we do invite people we used to have a maintainer lottery effect three people are the maintainer fall at random and then invite them and that turned out to really not work I mean we didn't know why it didn't work about it yes sir yeah I don't know it didn't seem to work for some reason because we talked about Processing's we don't talk about necessarily technical things as a kernel summit because we don't have everybody that's involved in that technical area in the same room at the same time one exception we talked about module signing today and that's because we dismissal II invited everybody that was involved and locked them in the room and we all fought and Lina said no and everybody said okay and I was wrong it was my fault so yeah so it's the colonel some it's more about process and how we're developing things not necessarily what the developers doing the mini summits many centers are great we had a bunch of PCI people and a bunch of people that don't normally show up to Colonel summits they were all in the room we work together sending with arm and video and everything else we had a USB summit last year and in Vancouver and there was new people there yeah I think if we were to take a look at some of the subsystem workshops and not just simply the ones that met two met during this week such as arm in media and mcg but also the Linux file system storage mm Bluetooth and Wi-Fi we'll be meeting in Barcelona next month I suspect you will find a lot more new blood in some of those more technical subsystem workshops which is I think as it should be okay fair enough so I don't necessarily see any members the audience lining up yet but members the audience just remember this is a competition you get points for making the moderator look good so there is no one will go to one of the Twitter questions which was submitted by Sean Michael Kern a reporter somewhere in the room he's not daring to raise his hand and he wants to talk he's there okay he wants to talk about the bus problem which means that a lot of us have thought about throwing leanness under the bus especially when he criticizes our patches but what half what would we do if it actually happened so leanness I always have the same answer and that is I won't care but realistically we do have a very strong I mean development community including at the top so I think the biggest problem would be there would be some political where different companies would hope that they could kind of push whoever is the new maintainer in in certain directions and they've kind of gotten used to the fact that I'm I'm hard to push around but they'd get their hopes up and they would push drag or somebody around right so there would be some politic politics going on but at the same time the kernel project is of all the open source projects very very special I have talked to other project maintainer x' and they have groups of four people or groups for a big project it might be groups of 20 I think the I mean X is a huge project it's been around for 30 plus years what 10 15 people we have 3000 we have just that the kernel summit we get 85 people and that is maintainer x' not necessarily developers I mean a lot of them do end up being developers as well but I'm trying to say that the bus problem for the kernel does not exist because we just have such a huge mass of developers and maintainer x' other projects if one of the main top maintainer x' gets thrown under a bus they just were decimated the kernel not so much anything to add anybody else one thing about Linux kernel development it's not I mean I draw it as a nice perfect pyramid of things going up and patches flowing I graphed it one year and it was a what 15 meter long graph by 3 I mean it's huge its interconnected it's a huge network effect we're at around people we interact so it's a very meshed networking system that can recover from problems we have had people pass away that were maintained errs of subsystems and we survived and route around them and worked so yeah I mean I think one other thing that's actually fairly important to recognize is that many many decisions happen near the bottom of the tree right by the people who are actually making the code there are occasions when leanness will step in and arbitrate if there's a serious debate between two people but I think very often most of the work that you've actually had to do when you've had to you know speak ex cathedra has either process questions or quality questions not a technical decision I mean there are a few but those are really the exceptions not the rules so I don't worry about technical issues at all because because none of me even if I make the wrong choice which can sometimes happen technical questions are easy to just say oh that was the wrong choice let's fix it I 10 and as already mentioned at the kernel summit to a lot of the discussion is really about the flow and process not about technical issues and I think we have a really strong process okay so still no questions from the audience come on I need to I think we could have done with a warm-up act to liven you up today because I will ask another one and you did actually mention things about we've been going for a long time we've actually been going for 21 years and if you look at most successful trends in the industry they usually hit something they do really well they stay at this sort of top plateau for a long time and something else comes along and unseats them you can see it in what happened with the PC revolution destroying effectively all of the other little computers and some of the mainframes you can see it in the way that Microsoft is struggling to get outside the desktop with Windows do you think there's something coming along in the future that would unseat us if yes what and why and if not why not and I think since we started with you will start with Ted right I think one of the things that's been really interesting about Linux is that it's been flexible enough that it's been able to be used in many many different ways I think it was IBM saying at this point probably close to ten years ago about Linux working on everything from wristwatches to mainframes when we first started working on Linux I certainly had no conception that we would be using it on cell phones heck I don't think we had cell phones back then that's dating yeah we did they were actually you know pretty big beasts so it I think one of the things has been really cool is to watch Linux be adaptable enough to make it make the leap from you know one successive set of hardware challenges to another and as long as we're flexible enough to accept the fact that you know we may need to do things a little bit differently to work for example on very low-power devices such as mobile handsets we'll be able to adapt to many different environments and so as long as we stay flexible I think we can continue to you know sort of make that leap as the wider industry moves on to newer things but you know could that change at some point obviously but I don't know when that would be that being said I don't know what the next big thing for Linux will be once we get past you know sort of the mobile the handset the embedded but I'm sure something will come along you know maybe it will be you know driving little nanobots and we'll see what happens at that point okay thank you Sarah I don't know I think you know I think maybe the next big thing is wearable computing and so you know I don't know what Linux might be too big for that particular thing you might have something smaller but one of the things I was concerned about for a while was you know with with Android one of the good things about Linux is that it's so open anyone could fork it and but we sort of it's if that fork never came back and into Linux then you know you'd say oh that's fine we'll continue on but androids so big right now that I'm glad they're finally sort of coming back to Linux so that we can actually learn from them and work with them more so if I could pick up on that is it the back coming back to Linux so we may not wait it was only a 7000 line for coming come on the serial drivers twice the size of three times the size of seven thousand lines of code okay Greg molinos any final thoughts on I've always I mean if you look at our development I've always said the only thing that's gonna stop us is ourselves I mean if we mess up somehow so our goal is not to mess up I would like to I mean the point that Ted makes about us being very flexible and having new devices and new use its cage cases come in it is also the thing that has kept I think Linux very interesting as a technical project and it's also been very interesting how devices a new usage cases often force us to do something in a different manner and it almost invariably turns out that some of the old use in this case cases actually really wanted to do that too but they just never had the impetus to do it and and it's been interesting to see how the low-power work was started from the embedded world and now all the server people are talking about power awareness right and conversely the server people came in and wanted to do SMP and now all the cellphones run two or four cores so it's I think it's been interesting and very healthy for for Linux how we've had all these different areas that have have pushed us in different directions yeah and I think if you amplify the point one thing is important about us is that effectively were just a kernel we don't constitute a complete system and that makes us very adaptable to fit into other complete systems which is the Android thing I think that Ted brought up so audience have you've had a bit of time to think about questions fifteen minutes as anybody actually thought of what we have one can we have a microphone down ok over that first then yeah just just one comment you know you you talked about Linux being so adaptable but you know you're talking about cell phones now that are more powerful than what you had 10 years ago how much adapting did you really need to do so I think well running on cell phones 10 years ago - yeah so it runs better on cell phones today it is definitely definitely true that one reason why Linux works well on cell phones is that cell phones grew up to the point where they needed a real operating system so there's some truth to that at the same time it's definitely also true that cell phones did force us to do things in different ways okay we needed a microphone down here oh you have to excuse me I don't really see kernel system the communication systems has been built on IRC and email and whenever you've had a problem you just went out and invented something you invented get has social networking had any impact on how you guys interact with each other are you going to invent one for us well so let's start with Sarah since you've been exposed to social networking for more of your life than the rest of us I think you know when Google came up there was a lot more technical people on Google+ so for social networking for me it's like you know Facebook's friends if I'm not your friend on Facebook it's okay but that's fine LinkedIn is for professional stuff and and Google+ seems to be for more technical people now so I don't know I think that everyone's pretty comfortable with IRC and whatever text editor they have and they're there mud or pine or whatever actually let's turn this around so if you asked me that question I would say that email and IRC are are form of social networking would that be a point you'd agree with in which case the question to us becomes is there anything that we could take from the rest of the social networking world and add it to our tools assuming we actually know what social networking is leanness I don't know I never did the Facebook thing and the one thing Google+ taught me is that there's a lot of so III don't know I like the email is still the way I communicate with people when it comes to actual work and I do think that most of the social networking isn't geared towards complicated technical questions that you really need a a very in-depth medium to answer and email is both in-depth and and precise so then there is some room for more social environment IRC has traditional being the month at the kernel developers use when was the last time you were actually on the kernel IRC I don't do IRC I've seen you on a I think one of the most powerful social networking tools that we've had is the in-person face-to-face social networking right that's literally what we're doing here all - all day right and I think we've been blessed the Linux community that is that you know it's been so commercially significant that we've been able to afford to be able to bring together you know 85 of the top developers so that we can actually renew the social bonds so that we you know it's we're much less likely to flame each other if we've actually you know you know hoisted a beer over the bar even eaten together at a table and that actually helps us when we then go back and have to exchange long emails there's that's something that we've known for a very very long time it's one of the reasons why we started the kernel summit and it may very well be that there are other open-source projects that have not been as lucky to be able to have you know corporate sponsors and an organization like the Linux Foundation to bring us all together in all of the various different events where you know things like you know Google+ hangout might be a substitute but we've had something which is so much better which is just the face-to-face interaction that it may have been that that plus IRC an email was just good enough maybe next year we can try a Google+ hangout of a mini con yeah yeah maybe yeah I don't know so uncle what are the advantages of the kernel summit is it only happens once a year so I think the message if I could synthesize it from Ted is if you see a bsd developer invite them to a party there's something a BSD developers anymore there's still quite a few any other thoughts on social networking I swore I fired C for the past six months and I've never been happier I have to try that actually okay any other questions from the audience yeah we have one here hi my name is Alex Poli um I was curious what stuff going into the kernel right now and you most excited about and why well let's start with Greg since you see so much of it I see crap I mean I'm in charge of the staging tree which is we take the bat under driver the reason you're in charge of the stating trees because you're excited by crowd telescope uses the bat excites you now I'll tell you about this really now there's this really bad driver we have but you never believe what it does every single Wireless packet honks about to userspace them back anyway so I see the crap and I see it get cleaned up I just see bad stuff but as he's supporting new hardware so it's actually running in some of your phones right now which is really sad so you think of yourself basically as the Colonel's toilet brush I am the colonel no III don't see new stuff she's doing these stuff okay so Sarah tell us about the new stuff the interesting stuff the stuff that's not crap well there's a whole bunch of usb3 stuff that's going in if your USB 3 doesn't work on your Linux laptops and send me and the the Linux here's be mailing list you know cuz it should work one of the things that that I'm excited about outside of my area is the Bluetooth for stuff that's going in the low Low Energy I was actually contributed to the Kickstarter to get one the Pebble watches so I'm hoping that we have link support for Bluetooth for have okay good you have it on Android yet though so I can connect my pebble to my Android phone so I think one of the important messages there is Sarah would like a Bluetooth watch yeah so I'd like to make a shout out to some work that John Stoltz has been doing which is volatile memory ranges and the thing that was really cool about that was that was work that was being done as part of the lonardo project to take what was admittedly a somewhat dodgy way that Android went had to deal with very low memory situations which is one of these cellphone challenges and do it in an upstream acceptable way so that the kernel could very easily throw away user space where user space has given permission that something you know could be thrown away because we could very easily regenerate it and I I was talking to someone who worked works on the chromium browser and he started salivating saying oh this is great I could use that instantly so that we could make chrome less memory hungry and then earlier this week when we were talking about this Christoph Helwig said and XFS products could use this too and so there is an example of something that started as something that was needed for the cell phones and XFS Prague's is you know the XFS utilities that have been around for a very very long time for very high-end performance servers and that's that's an example of something that leanness was talking about about something that was originally for one part of the space and it's going to be useful in many others and that's just really cool okay and leanness I think the most interesting thing you do is rename the Colonel periodically can you tell us what names you actually have in mind for the next one okay I don't tend to do so much on so what takes to make me really excited and happy this is this is really thank you yes the the kinds of things that make me happy are when some really painful process issue gets resolved so for me for example over the last year it's been arm has gone from being for me a constant headache every single merch window to being a upstanding citizen in the Linux community and those kinds of thing make me excited if you send me a pull request that removes more lines than it adds that makes me excited that sounds a bit sad but it's true it's really like I will ignore every single merch window roll and put rc6 if you remove a thousand lines of code I'll do its some audience there's your challenge do we have any other questions okay then I'll ask one and it goes to something that Greg got us to so I think this is another Shawn Michael Colonel Juan when is 4.0 going to be released you with you the one agitating for three for three yes well so when you get to higher numbers you're when they get old they forget so happy with three I don't know when we get love week at the 30s again maybe to be three nine and then four Oh mm-hmm I don't know I don't know it was um what's the matter just a number it's just a number anybody else have any other comments I definitely we are not going to go to like mid-30s it's much easier to tell the difference between five and six than it is between 97 and 98 there's just mentally much easier for people to remember small numbers than big so we'll do it 4.0 in three years maybe when the sub numbers have grown into the 20s and we say this is this is our feeble brains can't handle this anymore let's start again that's why we go fingers so I think three 311 would be about I think most people really like the fact that we just simply went from three digits to two digits yes okay any other questions oh you're a hard crowd please okay so this is for the people we've had a longer time to make mistakes if you could name one thing that you would have done differently what would it be and we'll probably start with Ted since I've been concentrating on this side of the room it's something that I would do differently anything ext2 for instance there I think there are a large number of you know subtle technical things I don't know the I can't think of anything really big or really bad I think Greg gave you the clear I mean the thing that I'm very very happy is that I ditched the tty layer before it actually got really complicated because most of the work that I did in the tty layer assumed a single processor CPU back when we only had a single processor CPU and there was a lot of ugliness that was there because I was very very much worried about high-speed serial links on very slow 386 systems and those days are long gone right we no longer do massive bulk bat transfers over the serial port and CPUs have gotten a wee bit faster since then and so there were I think a whole bunch of design trade-offs that I made where that code desperately needed to be rewritten and we never got around to rewriting it except for maybe incrementally slowly and painfully for which I can only offer my most abject apologies to the multiple successors who have tried for a couple of years and then ran away screaming so yeah but you know that it is what it is so Sarah to yellow to have regrets great I mentioned it at the curl summit config hot-plug I'll get rid of that okay that's the nightmare it's causes too many problems over the years I sending 100 bytes for it I mean everything's hot pluggable now I mean think plug was you was it yes all right oh maybe him Alina's I'm just offended that you think I've made mistakes I don't know I I think on the whole we're doing reasonably well okay can I get back I mean yet to Ted's credit the tty layer is horrible and I've been recovering from it for you guys to Ted's credit at the time Linux had the best high-speed serial support than anything else yeah and it worked really really well and we did much better than everybody else so unwinding that you did what we needed to do at the time yeah and that was good it might have been great but they ignored it for too long I think the problem is that we ignored something for too long and we're recovering I mean Alan Cox and usually sloppy is unwinding the mess in a wonderful job but it's something we ignored for maybe 10 years yeah I mean there was someone who's gonna do a whole lot of really good work to clean it up I can't even remember his name anymore and then transmeta sucked him up and we never saw him again but these things happen go home yeah okay so wait what do you regret I regret a little invitation to a colonel summits in 2002 to talk about react texting the scuzzy subsystem I think okay do we have any questions yes we have a question from the audience I don't know if there are any tools that you think are really great right now any tools you think you're really great leanness you can't talk about git so give us another one leave us just I'm tired we go Greg I mean perf I think I ignored it for too long perf is amazing unless you do I mean the stuff you were doing the perf to the low-level debugging and we have GUI tools with it now and we're we are leanness was arguing about where to draw the arrow things like that so perp is amazing perfect I strongly recommend everybody and it's easy to use I really is you don't need to configure anything you don't need to be rude you don't need to do anything at all you just do perfect chord on your problem spot and if it's CPU limited you'll know exactly where Sarah I like puppets birth good although I wish that they would actually change the name to something you could Google for okay so the tool that I've been using this actually helped me the most is KVM the fact that I can build a kernel on my laptop kick off a regression test and then let it run while I'm doing other things is just so much easier than what I did before I mean at one point I actually had a little x10 controller so I could power cycle this machine and then it would TFTP boot because that was how it was doing my testing was you know kind of awful and it only worked from home and so as a developer you know most people think of KVM is this wonderful tool that they use you know at you know Rackspace or other you know sort of cloud providers but as a developer tools just you know it's been one of the things that's made my life so much easier any other questions yes yep okay we have one here where you can do pistols a door you go first um there's a lot that's been you know there's a lot that said about the quantity and quality of drivers for things in in Linux and so I wonder philosophically whose responsibility is is driver quality for things the the developers Tanner's the users for not complaining enough the hardware vendors for not shutting up and putting out open-source code for their hardware when they release it I mean you have to realize we have a million drivers and they're all different and some are really good because they are very common we've had drivers for a long time that we've been able to just generate good libraries for and everybody uses them and they get debugged immediately if something breaks and then there's the driver that one person uses in his basement to measure his temperature and surprise surprise if anybody else we're to try to use it it would break immediately because it just wasn't tested by anybody else so the notion that there's drivers in general is just false there's there's a whole range of quality issues there's a whole range of who did it sometimes that manufacturers do the drivers that's not always good sometimes the manufacturers do absolutely horrible drivers and sometimes to be fair the hardware is also so bad that it's very hard because that is that we try to that sometimes drivers most of the work in the driver is working around the fact that their hardware is just crap so it's not our fault you say that's a big question but but in the end it's mostly Greg who ends up being the head point man for most of the drivers in so some kid had to say the worst examples of hardware are almost always in USB so you to know you know there's only so much you can do with USB but I was saying there's a lot of broken hardware that we just can't work around I mean a scuzzy it's the USB drivers that refused to tell us if they have a cache behind the USB thing yeah we don't know when to wash them I mean we've got these data loss problems when the system's suspended where do we expect when that ship costs you five cent I mean it's there's a reason it's cheap yeah it should be running Linux right yeah so I think I turned the question around right good good drivers is everybody's responsibility and there it's a team effort and there are a lot of people who've done a lot of good work to make sure that we've had all of the great drivers that the questioner was talking about from the laptop and server manufacturers who made it a demand of their component suppliers that there be an open-source driver to companies like Intel who have done really really good Linux drivers natively to manufacturers that have done you know so-so or really crappy drivers and then they go through the staging process and Greg and his volunteers who then improve it it's many many people who have you know work together to get us to the point that we are and and I think it's it's important to acknowledge everyone who has worked towards that and encouraged them all to continue doing all that really really good work it's also the testers to everyone who's running Linux on their laptop and actually sends us a bug report when something breaks you know you guys are important to that's yeah most important because it works for me yeah yeah so everybody who runs Linux on my laptop should be running the latest of a community distribution so you're increasing our testing pool thank you so much one thing worth noting about drivers is I think that's the source of most of our kernel developers even if you don't end up doing driver development almost everybody starts doing driver development because that's how you get sucked in trying to fix your one particular device that you happen to have and then you start with the driver and soon you're fixing the VM system okay so we had another question over there I think yes so four years or is this crusade to get rid of the big Colonel Locke what is the current quest these days as aand we're talking around all those because it's gone yeah he did an awesome job what's next what's the next big challenge in the colonel well there's a TTY lock which we kind of just moved a big current lock into the tty lair I win nobody does high school high-speed serial across multiple devices except it turns out your cell phone wants to talk I speed cereal to the other processor anyway we're working on that but TTY I block I don't know what's big yeah I mean the big Colonel Locke was interesting because it involved a lot of different people it's there aren't that many things that frost you know that many boundaries anymore there might be a few things where we need to have people from the VM layer and the VF s layer cooperating but you know there aren't that many things that that are like the bkl removal project maybe power because power touch a lot of differences names yes power management took us a long time in general because every single time I mean we still have just dropping the actual power usage but all our hot plug issues and all the power management in that we mostly do correctly now for things like suspend and resume that took forever exactly because it crossed a lot of boundaries and up and down as low as yeah so he's still improving it I mean it was only two colonel revisions ago that my ex 220 I actually went from about four hours battery life to eight hours battery life yeah any other questions yep we have another one about licensing do you see GPL version 2 only as a limiting factor or you is there any chance for a broader license since projects are moving on the GPL version 3 well that's the leanest question isn't that GPL version 2 is it and that is the broader license it's not as restrictive as the alternative any other I think we're all fairly unanimous on this one right very well sir okay if there are no more questions I'll ask one there is one okay yeah hi so there's been continues talk about including more some user space stuff into kind of like the kernel stuff that would kind of constitute a basic Linux system I was just wondering if I could have your thoughts about how far that would go what would get included in there and where would you draw a line if that makes any sense okay Greg Nord it you can answer it case-by-case basis I'm serious I mean perfer forked out really good to be in there I don't know people have argued for all KVM to be in there and that might be too much I don't it's a fine line anybody else there are serious disadvantages to putting stuff in the kernel tree so on the whole you don't want to do it then occasionally you have something that ends up being so closely tied to the kernel and has developer overlap to we're putting it in the kernel tree makes it easier both for the developers and the users and I think perf was a perfect example of that but it does it's actually fairly rare so right now we have perf we have some testing scripts that hopefully somebody uses and that's pretty much it I don't think we have that much else user space wise except for our own kernel configuration tools and stuff like that that we just need for the kernel itself I think one of them one of the it touches back to something we said earlier about the kernel flexibility and being able to work on lighter weight devices the fact that we don't include for example a sea library can be a big advantage because G Lib C is perfect in certain environments but it's also kind of big and kind of bloated and if you're going to be doing really really small devices people have generally used other C libraries and there's good reasons for that and and so the fact that those things are packaged separately has actually been you know has had some real advantages disadvantages too but a lot of good advantages okay so I think we're out of time we have time for probably one more question and I'll ask the panel for closing statements what criteria are there if any when you decide to remove a driver before example I have one practical case where the company who contributed the drive is out of business it is next to impossible to find for a lot of efforts I managed to find one in Serbia of all places and I got I managed to destroy it as well so I can't fix the driver personally I would like to get rid of the whole thing but what sort of criteria are there one when you decide to just okay I give up I nobody can test it nobody seems to have hardware and let's get rid of it so this came up in the colonel summit oh you want to summarize okay well I'm not gonna summarize the thing but I'm also I'm going to say that one of the criteria has to be that it has to be a pain point if it's something that we can just carry around and nobody ever complains about and it's still compiles and fixing it up for small changes so that continues to compile there's no reason to remove it I mean don't remove it just because you get rid of a thousand lines and make me happy I don't care about those things you removed all my mca drivers I used to be MCA maintaining you know that may have been the pain point now I mean we do remove drivers over for the south yet we actually removed some fairly recently but on the other hand we mentioned the 3c 501 driver which is like the original driver I mean pretty much it's been there since not day 1 but since we had networking and I don't think anybody has that card but the only reason to remove it would be to remove it there's no other real reason to do so so then you're actually from a good perspective you're using more energy to remove it than just leaving it alone it's like don't do it I mean I always say if there's long as there's somebody who uses it or a piece of hardware out there it's ok the key there's no hardware anywhere like you just have one machine in your basement the whole architecture in the world I still have a machine in my basement when you want you then maybe you might question the person sanity so we keep it there's one user we keep it right no note was removed no boy who was dropped to God years ago it's my driver you can remove it that one was actually causing pain ok so I think we have to wrap this up here so we'll wrap up with each of you having 30 seconds to give an inspiring statement to the audience about why they should become film developers and we'll start with some ones have the least time to think which is Ted you should become a kernel developer if it's fun I've been doing it for a long time and it's been a blast for me on the other hand if there's something else that you know really floats your boat and makes you excited do that that's that's the most important thing okay Sarah I became a kernel developer because I like being where the software Matt the hardware where I could actually fiddle with things and bleak lights and bright drivers and you know if that's something you like device drivers are for you if you like messing with memory and then memories for you but you know it's it's it's a fun community you know our we've got some rough edges but once you get to know people it's it's been fun great well agree with them but also I mean we if you want to be a chrome developer thought there's lots of choices to travel so I think we figured it out and figured out what we can travel every other week there's a Linux conference somewhere in the world we can do and I think he was out all of them so I mean if you want to see the world become a chrome developer great and leanness sign with Sarah I started doing kernels because I think user mode programming is boring and I'm really interested in the hardware but I wouldn't want to actually build it myself but at the same time as mentioned earlier we have enough kernel developers to some degree there are tons of really worthy open-source projects that need help and so I would not want to argue that people should be kernel developers because quite often they should be developers in some other project entirely so leanness is final thoughts ago hack on something else thank you very much to our panel and thank you very much all right I want you I want you guys to stay up here for just one second we got rarely give advice to this crew but I'm just gonna give a small word of advice when you start talking about how old you are and you're trying to portray yourself as young here's a couple of do nots talking about the time before cellphones finally signing up today for the Twitter discussing your regrets you notice Sarah had no regrets and then finally and I think this is the the one is talking about the social networking crazies

Channel: The Linux Foundation

Views: 31,405

Keywords: Linux, Linus Torvalds, software, computers, technology, developers, events, conferences

Id: _-UnhWJjGJk

Length: 51min 23sec (3083 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 24 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/valgrid]

There are many applications which really need more developers, because the programs they program are important for smooth computer experience.

Like the GIMP, its a really nice program but there is much more space for improvements. And think about audacity, a program that can everything a average audio tool schould habe, but it has a terrible interface.

And think about GnuCash which needs some functions for small businessmen. With some important function it could increase the userbase extremely.

[u/[deleted]]

I think we need another window manager. Maybe a tiling wm based on javascript.

[u/Ray57]

Maybe I'll work on a micro-kernel then. Sounds like allot less work.

[u/SixPackCock]

We need a competitor to GIMP, to rip out its algorithms and photo-editing-tools, but with a much better interface, perhaps in Qt. And it needs to then kick ass both of GIMP and Photoshop.

Then we need a superior video editor for anything else you have ever seen. Like Nukex and Cinelerra and Blender all in one. It should be possible to import and edit really simple videos, like from cameras, using 2-3 tools, and with a click go into advanced mode where everything is possible.

We need GarageBand, and a Traktor/DJing software, with more fancy analysis of audio than any windows-tool can give. And it needs to be GPL so the proprietary software vendors dont just use it as a plugin in their own shitty software.

Where is CAD software for Linux?

We need software for anyone that is not a programmer on and for Linux. Also libreoffice sucks. The email-clients suck, thunderbird, they are competitive with email clients from 2001 not with 2012.

If you're a programmer you should help or fork, GnuOctave, GIMP, Cinelerra, Blender, Audacity, traktor and so on.

[u/twistedLucidity]

Making sound work?

If you'll excuse me, I'll be sitting over there with a nice cup of tea watching the "Sound works", "Oh no it doesn't", "Oh yes it does", "Oooooh, no it doesn't!"... pantomime. :)

[u/Sailer]

Work on getting the Linux Kernel and the X Server to boot on Tablets, then.

Hey Linus, you got Linux and X booting on the Hitachi VisionPlate running Midori Linux in 2002. How about doing that to some of the contemporary tablets?

[u/Lutherush]

It's not the number of developer what is counting, it's the quality of their work.