Linux Archive

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the 'Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler'. He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads."

A recent discussion on the lkml examined the possibility of a Linux implementation of Sun's ZFS. It was pointed out that the file system is released under the GPL-incompatible CDDL, and that Sun has filed numerous patents to prevent ZFS from being reverse engineered. Max Yudin pointed out, "according to Jeff Bonwick's blog Sun issued 56 patents on ZFS, but I have no idea what they patented. Sorry, binary compatible ZFS reimplementation with GPL license might not be legal."

"Even though I enjoy using my Linux boxes a great deal for the most part, there are still those little annoyances that are enough to drive a guy batty. After all, even something as elegant and as effective as the top Linux distributions can still do certain things to drive you nuts from time to time." More here.

In a nod toward the RTOS market that founder Jim Ready pioneered, MontaVista is shipping a new version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution said to offer true real-time performance along with a very small footprint. MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Version 5.0 boasts enhanced real-time performance and lower resource usage.

Arch Linux team has just released their Voodoo (version 0.8) ISOs. Many changes and brand new software application versions included, while at the same time the Arch team released Pacman, v3.0, currently available in the -Testing tree.

The founder of the Open Graphics Project writes: "Good design and usability are very important. I haven't paid enough attention to the discussions between Linus and GNOME developers, so I can't address it directly. But what I can say is that a learning curve is not a bad thing. While it's good to think about the total novice, it's even more important to have consistent and logical mechanisms. This way, if someone has to learn something new to use the computer, they have to learn it only once. This is why I think it's good that Apple and Microsoft have UI development guides that encourage developers to make their apps act consistently with other apps in areas where their functionalities conceptually overlap. And this is where I start to get disappointed with GNU/X11/Linux systems."

"The idea that Linux is primarily a community-based project based on the work of thousands of independent, idealist hackers died a quiet death at home on March 27th. The proximate cause of death was the Linux Foundation's naming of its new board of directors. This leading non-profit Linux organization's board included many Fortune 500 executives from around the world - but not one representative from a purely community-based Linux organization."

"Linux system calls - we use them every day. But do you know how a system call is performed from user-space to the kernel? Explore the Linux system call interface, learn how to add new system calls (and alternatives for doing so), and discover utilities related to the SCI."

"As evidenced by major central processing unit vendors, multi-core processors are poised to dominate the desktop and embedded space. With multiprocessing comes greater performance but also new problems. This article explores the ideas behind multiprocessing and developing applications for Linux that exploit SMP."

"One of the biggest complaints about Linux, particularly from developers, is the speed with which Linux boots. By default, Linux is a general-purpose operating system that can serve as a client desktop or server right out of the box. Because of this flexibility, Linux serves a wide base but is suboptimal for any particular configuration. This article shows you options to increase the speed with which Linux boots, including two options for parallelizing the initialization process. It also shows you how to visualize graphically the performance of the boot process."

"Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards."

Hewlett-Packard is closing custom deals for thousands of desktop PCs running Linux, which has the company assessing the possibility of offering factory-loaded Linux systems, an HP executive said. "We are involved in a number of massive deals for Linux desktops, and those are the kinds of things that are indicators of critical mass. So we are really looking at it very hard," said Doug Small, worldwide director of open source and Linux marketing at HP. "We are in a massive deal right now for multi-thousands of units of a desktop opportunity for Linux. That's an indicator." He declined to give details about the deals.

"rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around - nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command and combined with version control to meet the demands of a modern distribution."

"Freedom of choice is one of the great benefits of Open Source Software in general and Linux in particular. This freedom gives consumers the ability to select, without fear of litigation, what software they will use and how they will use or modify it. As a principal, this freedom is extremely valuable. However, a couple of announcements this week seem to indicate that market value of freedom of choice has dipped considerably. The biggest hurdle Linux adoption faced this week wasn't Microsoft, it was an enemy from within: Linux fragmentation."