Linus Torvalds World Tour 99: Balug Chinatown

What's in this page?

After visiting SVLUG last year (in the Silicon Valley), Linus was kind enough to come to our sister user group, BALUG on Tuesday June 15th, which meets in San Francisco's Chinatown.
This page gives some info on the little talk he made and the Q&A session that followed.

Somehow I always manage to write my pages late at night when I'm tired and even less able to spell or articulate thoughts in a way that makes some sense to other people, than usual that you have to feel free to point out spelling mistakes and factual errors if there are any, I'll update the page quickly.

If you are still bored after reading this page, you're more than welcome to waste even more time by reading other reports I've written, like my pages on Linuxexpo 99, LinuxWorld Expo Winter 99, or the various other reports and pictures I have on my linux page

Marc Merlin

BALUG

As everyone knows, those who are not fortunate enough to live in the Silicon Valley, live in San Francisco. While the enlightened ones honor us by driving down to see us at each SVLUG meeting, they still felt that they had to have some kind of local linux meeting (as if there was a life beyond SVLUG), and they felt compelled to create BALUG which meets in San Francisco.
Because they usually are lonely during their meetings, and because at SVLUG, we care for our fellow linux users, some SVLUG members usually face rush hour traffic to go to BALUG and make the event more lively.
Oh, and did I tell you about VA and Linuxcare? Mmmmhhh, never mind, forget I said anything

(Hehe, I'm sure I just made a lot of friends. Man, now I'll have to move before they TP my apartement and my car

)

Anyway, back to serious business: I have to admit, they handled the large crowd (close to 400) beautifully, thanks to the great volunteers from BALUG (under the supervision of Mike Higashi and Dave Mandala, expert event organisers).

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Rick Moen and Nick Moffitt, two of the BALUG volunteers

The Four Seas Restaurant, the restaurant in Chinatown where BALUG meets every month, and were we enjoy great food before each talk, was really packed that evening. Say what you want, but Linus moves people.

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The presentation

The cool thing with Linus is that he will sign anything you want or also: books, t-shirts, laptops, you name it (even a leather jacket once). The only rule he has is no signing of body parts

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Dave Sifry from Linuxcare and Chris Dibona from VA Linux Systems made the introduction, and announced that since Linuxcare and VA were giving money to the Debian project for each person who attended Linus's talk, about $7000 was going to be donated. Thanks to both companies.

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Linus

Then came time for Linus to speak. Since he prefers interactive talks, he gave a 10-15mn presentation and then switched to questions and answers.
What he mentionned was that while the 2.3 branch started recently, he definitely wants that branch to be over much faster than the 2.2 branch which took forever (2.5 years). What he is looking at is to have 2.4 out before the end of this year, but time will tell and as he said "I have been known to slip before"

For now, the two main things for the 2.3 branch, are USB support and performance enhancements. In the 2.2 branch, SMP was greatly enhanced but there is still work to do, especially if you look at some benchmarks. It's also a good thing to improve those for PR reasons.

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Linus then switched to Q&A and mentionned the following things:

On the issue of risks of bloating for fine grained SMP support, Linus answered that the main problem with OSes like Solaris, is not too much with the SMP locks, but with other parts of the kernel that were never changed (on Solaris, the sucky filesystem comes to mind)
Linus is looking at 8, maybe 16 CPUs, but not 256 or 512 CPUs. After 16 CPUs or so, he prefers to look at clustering because a lot of hardware, especially PC hardware, wasn't designed for such scalability anyway.
The usual question of "how about more than 4G on 32bit CPUs?" was asked and Linus's answer was to use a real CPU (i.e. 64 bits). He however mentionned after that, that Steven Tweedie is working on handling those machines even though, according to Linus, the support may not be in for 2.4 and by then, Merced will probably be out, so what's the point?
As far a large file support on 32 bit architecture, the answer is similar, get real hardware, and especially the problem is that the huge kludges necessary to work around hardware limitations are going to come bite us down the road when the hardware limitations are gone.
Linus is also interested in reaching the desktop, set top boxes, appliances, and why not phones... While he doesn't work on it, the desktop is an interesting universe because you have lots of applications and users who do the most unexpected things
For now, he doesn't have a list of what he will allow in 2.4. At this point, performance and USB are the main focus and we'll see afterwards.
While the penguin was announced as a 2.0 mascott at the beginning, there's no plans for a new mascott for linux 3.0
Some of PCMCIA is going to go in the kernel, but Linus doesn't see all PCMCIA devices in the kernel.
He sees some tree fragmentation not for specific hardware architectures, but for different kinds of uses like desktop versus high end servers and beowulf machines, it can make sense to have different kernels.
About linux standards, it makes sense to him to document the existing as a standard instead of coming up with a brand new thing that people are likely to cheerfully ignore, especially when it comes in way too late.
For USB, the existing support wasn't moving very fast, and Linus looked at it and had a hard time understanding it, so he made the reasonable assumption: "if I can't understand it, it must be bad" and while he admitted to not liking having done that (because as a good programmer, he is lazy that doesn't like to rewrite code), he started a new USB stack from scratch that isn't as fancy but much easier to understand and he is happy that some people took over that code.
At this point, he doesn't see himself as starting a new project, and he seems to be ready to go at it for another 8.5 years, but after that he wouldn't mind taking a vacation, if possible on a small island
For now there is no planned kernel HA support, the idea is not to crash in the first place. User space solutions can be used instead.
While we can ignore bad benchmarks, other people don't necessarly ignore them and someone wrote a really clean implementation of http in the kernel, and there is a chance for that to go in the kernel.
About source management, Linus is convinced that CVS is indeed not the right tool, and he is going to give a serious look at Bitkeeper when it comes out (scheduled for July 15th). (Bitkeeper is from Larry McVoy, and you can see my report of his talk at linuxexpo if you'd like more info about it)
And last, but not least, he told us what transmeta does: Cool stuff

Misc

Linuxcare did it again, this time they used Debian for their Simply Palm-like poster ad.

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Mike Higashi showing off the new Linuxcare poster

See this bit of my linuxexpo report for the Red Hat version of this poster, and the story associated with it.

If you want free palm pilots, write your own free OS
This time, it's linuxcare who gave Linus a Palm Pilot, version V, no less...

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Max's

Because the real linux geek has no life outside of CABAL meetings (there is no CABAL), we couldn't quite go home yet, and because you can actually find places to eat after 22:00 in San Francisco (other than Denny's that is), we went to Max's

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Thanks

Thank you very much to all the fine folks from Linuxcare, BALUG and the other volunteers who made all this happen and to Sam Ockman for getting Linus as a speaker in the first place.

If you want to see more pictures I took that evening, you can browse the picture library. You can also find an article from Reuters here

See y'all next time.

Marc Merlin (marc_web@merlins.org)

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Link to Home Page

99/06/17 (01:48): Version 1.0
99/06/17 (09:15): Version 1.1. Added the date of the event
99/06/17 (12:25): Version 1.2. Fixed a few references from Linuxcare to BALUG. Credited Dave Mandala
99/06/17 (15:33): Version 1.3. Fixed a few spelling mistakes that were reported to me 99/06/23 (23:10): Version 1.4. Added link to article on Yahoo