Linux Foundation Weblogs

Angela Brown: LinuxCon Program and Event Details Take Shape

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:54:04 +0000

This year is moving by quickly and it seems that LinuxCon is now just a few months away. It has been very exciting watching the event take shape, and I know it will be a success for this, and years to come. Some of the highlights that I see for this year include:

The speakers: We’ve got the big names, some you see at many other events, and some that are rarely seen. Check out who is speaking.

The added value of co-located events: Okay, so this year more than ever, it is important to get the most bang for your buck. Well spend a week in Portland, OR this September, and that is very much going to happen! In addition to all of the great content and programming you will find at LinuxCon alone over three days, you will also find the following events: LDAPCon, the Linux Plumbers Conference, an openSUSE Developer Day, FOSS Dev Camp, a SE Linux mini-summit and, with the absence of Brainshare this year, Novell will be presenting their Linux content at their own tracks at LinuxCon. Plus, we keep adding to this list every week. Attendees will get so much out of being here!

The fun: In addition to great content, we want you to enjoy your time at LinuxCon outside the classroom. So we have put in a ton of ‘hallway track’ time each day. We are working on some fun and relaxing evening events (free beer!) plus some cool lounge areas for attendees to take a break in during the day. We are brainstorming on some fun schwag ideas - let us know if you have any thoughts - and much more. We promise that you will have a good time while you’re here! Hey, it’s Portland - how can you not!?

If you haven’t registered to attend LinuxCon this year, you should - and make sure to do so before August 15th when the registration fee goes up. It is only US$399 until then, and you can get an even larger discount if you are: a Linux Foundation Individual Member (30% off), a company sending three or more people (15% off) or attending Linux Plumbers Conference (also 30% off).

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at events at linuxfoundation dot org. We look forward to seeing you there!

Brian Proffitt: Linux as Messenger of Freedom

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:13:00 +0000

My weekend was a nice balance of relaxation and thinking--provided by a good book (The Unincorporated Man), a trip to the beach, and a very thought-provoking question from a Linux.com reader.

See? I do read your e-mails.

The question came from one Oscar Slone, who wrote:

Brian Proffitt: Brockmeier: Addressing Linux Challenges at LinuxCon

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:10:22 +0000

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier is a stable fixture in the Linux community, spreading the word about Linux and open source to all who will listen.

Brian Proffitt: Changing the Desktop Metaphor

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:38:25 +0000

Let's talk about windows.

No, not Windows. Windows--the kind made out of glass.

It's been raining a lot here in the Midwest these past couple of weeks, so I have been spending some contemplative moments away from the computer staring out my windows watching the garden grow, or the baby robins figure out how to master flight before the neighbors' cat finds them.

Amanda McPherson: A Conversation with Chris Mason on BTRfs: the next generation file system for Linux

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:00:18 +0000

If you run your data center on Linux you have likely heard of BTRfs, the next generation file system that was recently merged into the kernel. If you haven’t heard of it, you should, as it stands to make your life, and all those who handle large amounts of data on Linux, much easier, more reliable and more scalable.

While BTRfs isn’t ready for production yet, I think it’s one of the most exciting and important developments in Linux today. I recently sat down with Oracle developer Chris Mason to discuss the file system, how he corrupted Linus’ root filesystem with his first patch (and lived to tell about it) and just how you pronounce the name of the project.

Amanda: Can you describe BTRfs? What is it and why should users care?

Chris: Btrfs is a new, next generation filesystem designed from the ground up for Linux. It aims to solve scalability problems for larger and faster storage, while also adding features that existing Linux filesystems lack.

Amanda: There is a lot of choice of file systems in Linux. Some people might say there is too much choice. What do you think?

Chris: Linux has grown a rich infrastructure for filesystems, making it very easy to experiment and innovate with different storage technologies. So, it isn’t surprising that many different filesystem projects have found their way into the kernel.

One of the reasons we are able to sustain these projects is because Linux is used with so many different workloads and types of storage.

Amanda: What’s the status of BTRfs? I know it was merged in January 09 in kernel 2.6.29; when will it be ready for users to use in production?

Chris: One of the earliest goals of Btrfs was to attract other companies and developers interested in working on the project. This has helped build a strong group of contributors, and we’re concentrating on stability and performance.

We have most of the features we need today for Btrfs to be usable, including the core of multi-device support, checksumming and snapshotting that are crucial because other Linux filesystems don’t provide them today. After the 2.6.32 kernel release, I expect to have things in a state where we can start collecting early adopters for heavy
testing.

Amanda: Why did you start this project? Why is Oracle supporting this project so prominently?

Chris: I started Btrfs soon after joining Oracle. I had a unique opportunity to take a detailed look at the features missing from Linux, and felt that Btrfs was the best way to solve them.

Linux is a very important platform for Oracle. We use it heavily for our internal operations, and it has a broad customer base for us. We want to keep Linux strong as a data center operating system, and innovating in storage is a natural way for Oracle to contribute.

Amanda: What are some of the key features/improvments of Btrfs over existing file systems today? What file system would you compare it to?

Chris: Btrfs integrates multi-device management at the filesystem level. The devices can be mixed in size and speed, giving the admin much more flexibility when managing large pools of storage.

The long term goal is to be able to choose allocation policies that match the data being stored to the underlying devices.

Because Btrfs maintains both data and metadata integrity checksums, it is able to detect bad copies of blocks and use the internal RAID code to pull up the correct data.

Btrfs supports snapshots that are writable and can be snapshotted again. The copy-on-write mechanism that backs the snapshotting code makes key features possible, such as transparent compression. In future releases we plan to add online fsck, deduplication, encryption and other features that have been on admin wish lists for a long time.

Ext4 and XFS are the two filesystems we use most often for comparison. They both perform very well, so they are usually our performance target during benchmarking runs.

My favorite demonstration of Btrfs’ flexibility is the conversion tool from Ext3/4 to Btrfs. The conversion tool places all of the Btrfs metadata in the free space of the Ext filesystem, and adds Btrfs extent pointers to all of the file data blocks.

The conversion maintains the original Ext metadata as a snapshot, leaving the original filesystem unmodified. Until the snapshot is deleted, the conversion can be undone, reverting things back to the original Ext filesystem.

Amanda: Here’s a fun question: how did you get started working with Linux? What’s the very first patch you had accepted?

Chris: My first Linux project was a friendly race with the Ext3 developers. At the time, Linux didn’t yet have a journaled filesystem, and I was an admin looking at the features Linux was missing before it could be used in my own data center. I ended up working on journaling code for ReiserFS, and was then able to switch to filesystem programming full time.

Back when ReiserFS was merged into mainline, I managed to corrupt Linus’ root filesystem (ext2 at the time) with a last minute patch. So far I haven’t repeated that yet, but each new merge window gives me another try.

Amanda: There were some performance metrics reports recently on Btrfs that weren’t that glowing in comparison to XFS or Ext4. What’s your response?

Chris: Benchmarking is one of my favorite parts of development. With the 2.6.31 merge window, we’ve fixed most of the performance bottlenecks that caused problems in those benchmark runs. But, our goal isn’t to win every benchmark. Today’s filesystems perform very well, and usually when bad performance is found it gets tuned and fixed.

Btrfs is concentrating on features that can’t be implemented with Ext4 or XFS. It is important that we perform well, but I don’t expect to be at the top of every benchmark result.

Amanda: Was Btrfs created to replace Ext3/4 or do you see users still using those file systems? What about XFS?

Chris: The goal is definitely to replace Ext3 and Ext4 as the default Linux filesystem. I wouldn’t be surprised to find people holding on to the Ext series, it has a long history of stability, and not everyone needs the latest and greatest features.

XFS is likely to stay around just as long. It has been heavily tuned and optimized for high scalability, and that kind of investment takes a long time to match.

Amanda: You are a member of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. Can you tell me about your participation in that group and what it means?

Chris: The TAB is an great way to connect the Linux Foundation with community. It gives a broader base of input into the issues the Linux Foundation is trying to solve, and more people are aware of the LF initiatives.

Amanda: Now that your employer Oracle is purchasing Sun, and with it Solaris’ ZFS file system, any plans to license under GPLv2 so developers could port it to Linux? If so, is Btrfs still as needed?

Chris: Sun has many interesting projects, and I’m looking forward to working with their R&D teams. We’re committed to continuing Btrfs development, and ZFS doesn’t change our long term plans in that area.

Amanda: To clear this up, once and for all: is it pronounced BetterFS or ButterFS?

Chris: <Grin> Definitely both.

Andy Updegrove: The EC Settlement: Rambus, Writs and the Rule of Law

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:20:30 +0000

Why did perennial litigant Rambus, Inc. settle with the European Commission?

Certainly the most watched standards-related legal conflict of the decade involves the participation of memory technology vendor Rambus, Inc. in a working group hosted by standards developer Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) in the early 1990s. The fame (or notoriety) of the conflict arises in part from the importance of the conduct at issue (did Rambus set a “patent trap” for implementers of the standard that emerged from the working group?), and in part from the seemingly endless string of law suits that resulted from that conduct some fifteen years ago.

Most of these suits were brought by Rambus against vendors that refused to pay royalties when they implemented the standard, but these suits almost always resulted in vigorous counterclaims against Rambus, brought by those same implementers. And investigations into Rambus’s conduct were also brought by both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States, and by the European Commission in Europe. A separate string of cases related to alleged price fixing and other improper conduct by other vendors that participated in the same working group, which ended in record settlement amounts being paid by those vendors to the regulators.

In the course of these many suits and appeals, Rambus has sometimes won, and sometimes lost. But in every case, whenever it has lost, it has fought on - sometimes through multiple levels of appeal - until it ultimately prevailed.

That is, until now. On June 11, Rambus and the European Commission announced that they had reached tentative agreement on a settlement of the investigation of Rambus opened by the EC in August of 2007. In form, the settlement agreed is similar to the (later overturned) restrictions levied upon Rambus by the FTC - Rambus has agreed to forward-looking caps on the amount of licensing royalties that it will be permitted to charge for the right to implement the JEDEC standard in question.

But why, you may ask, has Rambus finally decided to settle rather than fight on in a case that involves the same conduct that it has so vigorously defended before? That is indeed an excellent question, and I’ll try and answer it as best I can in this entry.

Read the rest here

Linus Torvalds: Outwitting the fashion police

noreply@blogger.com (Linus) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:33:14 +0000

This is a public service announcement for all geeks.

Are you tired of people pointing out that you shouldn't use socks and sandals? I know, it really annoyed me too. It's like they are trying to take away your geek card.

But there's a solution.

For a year now, I've been avoiding the fashion police by instead of "sandals" wearing "shoes with holes in their sides". I've got these Keen's that look enough like shoes that nobody ever bats an eye at you wearing them with socks (Ok, by "nobody", I mean my wife, but that's all that matters, right?).

The problem is that it looks like the fashion police may be starting to figure it out. The model I have seems to be no longer in production, and now all the new ones I find are pretty obviously sandals (toes and/or heel showing).

So when I wear out my current ones, I'm going to be in trouble again. Damn.

Linus Torvalds: Happiness is a warm SCM

noreply@blogger.com (Linus) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:56:55 +0000

I'll have to post this while I'm still happy, because the merge window for Linux 2.6.31 opened a day ago (well, somewhat more, but I don't take patches immediately after doing a release), and so far it's been such a nice thing that I thought I'd better post while in a good mood. Before somebody sends me the merge request from hell.

So why am I in a good mood?

My real "work" is not really writing code any more, and hasn't been for a long time. No, I worry most about the whole "flow of patches", and the way development happens, rather than so much about any individual piece of code I maintain. And the last few release cycles have had a couple of really hard-to-merge issues - not because the code was necessarily bad, but because of how it was then presented to me as a fairly messy history.

And so far, the 2.6.31 merge window is going swimmingly. The x86 tree, which has gone through a yo-yo of different development models with (different) problems, seems to have gotten to that "good place" where it seems to be working.

Part of the problem is that 'git' is such a flexible tool that you can use it in various modes, and mix things up freely. The whole distributed nature means that there's no gatekeeper, you can do whatever you want. And the flexibility and power is good, but it does mean that it's also easy to make a mess of it - the old UNIX philosophy of giving people rope, and letting them hang themselves with it if they want to.

So it takes time for people (me included) to learn the rules that work. And it seems people are learning. And that feels really good.

Jim Zemlin: LinuxCon Keynote Speaker Bob Sutor Sits Down for Open Voices Podcast Interview

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:15:46 +0000

One of the coolest things I get to do in this job is talk to the developers and business executives who are every day advancing the Linux operating system. Our Open Voices Podcast Series showcases some of the most influential people in the Linux and open source software community, including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, Mitchell Baker, and many more.

Today we posted our latest conversation in the Series. This one is with IBM’s Bob Sutor. Bob recently moved into a new position at IBM where he is focused on Linux and open source software. It’s an interesting time for him and IBM given the company’s 10-year anniversary this year of its commitment to Linux. The podcast sheds some light on the last 10 years for Linux, as well as what the future holds. This is just a taste of what I expect he will expand upon in his LinuxCon keynote later this year.

Hear what Bob has to say about the ODF debate, as well as some really thoughtful insights on desktop Linux and the cloud, among others topics.

Open Voices: Interview with Bob Sutor

lfblogs@linux-foundation.org — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:51:03 +0000

In this episode of Open Voices, Linux Foundation Executive Director
Jim Zemlin talks with newly appointed VP of Linux and Open Source at
IBM Bob Sutor. They cover IBM’s current support of Linux, the origin
of that support, and the hotspots Bob sees in the Linux and open
source market today. Highlights include conversation about cloud
computing, Linux on the desktop, ODF, and the growth of the Linux
community.

Bob will cover these topics in more detail during his keynote at the
upcoming LinuxCon conference in September in Portland, OR.

Click here for transcript.

In this episode of Open Voices, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin talks with newly appointed VP of Linux and Open Source at IBM Bob Sutor. They cover IBM's current support of Linux, the origin of that support, and the hotspots Bob sees in the Linux and open source market today. Highlights include conversation about cloud computing, Linux on the desktop, ODF, and the growth of the Linux community. Bob will cover these topics in more detail during his keynote at the upcoming LinuxCon conference in September in Portland, OR. Click here for transcript.