Linux Archive

"People who think SD was 'perfect' were simply ignoring reality," Linus Torvalds began in a succinct explanation as to why he chose the CFS scheduler written by Ingo Molnar instead of the SD scheduler written by Con Kolivas. He continued, "sadly, that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I never the notion of merging SD for very long at all: Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than trying to work with them." He went on to stress the importance of working toward a solution that is good for everyone, "that was where the SD patches fell down. They didn't have a maintainer that I could trust to actually care about any other issues than his own." Update: OSNews user superstoned pointed us to the other side of the story.

"The news of Con Kolivas, a Linux kernel developer, quitting that role, along with an interview in which he explains why, could and should make loud noises around the Free Software community which is often touting GNU/Linux as the best operating system one could use, and not just because of freedom you have with it. In the interview he says certain things which should cause tectonic shifts in the mindset that we have all been having. Why didn't we realize these things before? As you can see, the article intrigued me quite a bit, and got me thinking about a better way forward for the Free Software OS. I'll go through some of the basic points that he makes and lay out one possible solution and its implications. However, take this article as just a discussion starter." My take: I have been advocating splitting the Linux kernel up (desktop, server, embedded) for years now.

Linus Torvalds included patches into the mainline tree which implement a stable userspace driver API into the Linux kernel. The stable driver API was already announced a year ago by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Now the last patches were uploaded and the API was included in Linus' tree. The idea of the API is to make life easier for driver developers: "This interface allows the ability to write the majority of a driver in userspace with only a very small shell of a driver in the kernel itself. It uses a char device and sysfs to interact with a userspace process to process interrupts and control memory accesses."

"Remember the 1980s worries about how the 'forking' of Unix could hurt that operating system's chances for adoption? That was nothing compared to the mess we've got today with Linux, where upwards of 300 distributions vie for the attention of computer users seeking an alternative to Windows."

"The problem is, for me, and many other developers, administrators or just normal users, that if you want to use applications from a different OS, you have to reboot and boot into the other OS. Sometimes, when you, for example, just want to do a quick test of a newly compiled application, and go back to work, it is very inconvenient and time consuming. Standard ways of dealing with these problems is either creating virtual machine for Linux, setting up two PCs (one with Windows, second with Linux) or using Cygwin/SFU (Services for Unix). But there is also another way, which allows you to run Linux on Windows natively - coLinux."

Version 5.0.2 of Yellow Dog Linux was recently released. It includes kernel 2.6.22rc4, SDK v2.0 for Cell BE, more than 70 bug fixes and updates, continued support for both 32- and 64-bit systems and has beta IBM 'System p' support.