Don't Panic! It's only Linux 3.0

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | July 22, 2011, 9:05am PDT

Summary

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.0 and he wants you to know that there has been no big changes. There have, however, been several small, but significant, improvements.

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Linux 3.0 is out and the big changes are… ah… well. Not much.

Linus Torvalds, its creator and lead developer had warned us that this would be the case: “So what are the big changes?”

“NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now; this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (”20 years“) instead. So no ABI [application binary interface] changes, no API [application programming interface] changes, no magical new features - just steady plodding progress.”

In case you didn’t get the message first time, when Torvalds finally released Linux 3.0 on July 22nd, he wrote, “As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it’s simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux. In fact, the 3.0 merge window was calmer than most, and apart from some excitement from RCU [Ready, Copy, Update] I’d have called it really smooth. Which is not to say that there may not be bugs, but if anything, there are hopefully fewer than usual, rather than the normal ‘.0′ problems.”

OK, but surely some things were changed right? Well, yes, there were. The not so big, but significant changes were, in no particular order:

The Xen hypervisor now can run natively with Dom0 (Domain 0) privileges. This gives it, like Linux’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), the ability to work at the lowest possible level of the Linux kernel. In practical terms this means Xen virtual machines should run faster.

There have also been improvements with how the kernel works with the still experimental Btrfs (B-tree file system) and the now standard ext4 file system. This, in turn, should lead to faster and, in the case of Btrfs, more reliable, file systems.

The Linux 3.0 kernel also improves its interoperability with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), a replacement for PC’s BIOS. While UEFI has been slow to catch on, it’s beginning to be picked up by major PC and server companies like HP. Since UEFI lends itself well for business desktop and server deployments, you can expect to see more and more UEFI computers entering the market in the next year or two.

3.0 is also bringing in a new implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) The net effect of this improvement will be speed up any application that calls on network services. While this won’t matter that much if you’re just trying to get the most from your Web browser, it can save significant time for Web servers and other network service software.

So, all-in-all, there is good stuff here. Radical? No. Revolutionary? I don’t think so! But, still good, solid improvements. I don’t know about you, but that works just fine for me.

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Top Five Linux Contributor: Microsoft

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | July 17, 2011, 1:45pm PDT

Summary

While you shouldn’t expect Windows to be open-sourced in your life-time, Microsoft—yes, Microsoft—is the fifth largest code contributor to Linux 3.0.

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Cats and dogs; apples and oranges; Linux and Microsoft. Two of these three things do not go together. Would you believe that Microsoft—yes Microsoft—was the fifth largest contributor to the soon to be released Linux 3.0 kernel? Believe it.

In a Linux Weekly News story, currently only available to subscribers, an analysis of Linux 3.0 contributors reveals that Microsoft was the fifth largest corporate contributer to Linux 3.0. While only 15h overall, that still puts Microsoft behind only Red Hat, Intel, Novell, and IBM in contributing new code to this version of Linux.

To be exact, Microsoft developer K. Y Srinivasan gets the credit for helping to improve Linux. Of course, as you might guess, neither Srinivasan nor Microsoft are doing this due to any particular love tor Linux per se.

The vast bulk of Microsoft’s contributions has been to its own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s 64-bit hypervisor-based virtualization system. It’s Microsoft’s answer to VMware and Linux’s own native Kernel-based Virtualization Manager (KVM).

Microsoft you see wants it to be possible for both Linux to run Server 2008 R2 instances and for Windows 2008 R2 to run Linux instances using its own virtualizaton tools. Microsoft has been working on this for some time with Novell, now SUSE.

At first, this code wasn’t open-sourced at all, but in 2009, it was discovered that some GPL code was already in Hyper-V’s Linux drivers. So it was that “In a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.”

It also helped, of course, that Microsoft, ever so reluctantly, has been forced to work with Linux to try to keep their market share. As Matt Asay, a noted open-source executive and author said at the time, “The news reflects Microsoft’s continued interest in lobotomizing its virtualization competition through low prices, but also the recognition that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat, Novell, and others in the open-source camp.”

In the months after that though Microsoft did little to improve its code. Indeed Greg Kroah-Hartman, who oversees code staging to the Linux kernel, has complained at times that “The [Microsoft] developers again seem to have disappeared, this is getting old” and he threatened to remove the code from Linux.

Microsoft seems to have finally gotten the message. In the last few months they’ve worked hard to improve Hyper-V and Linux interoperability.

This may not last, and it’s really only for Microsoft’s own goals, but for now, Microsoft, yes Microsoft, is a leading contributor to Linux. Now, in these days of miracles, let me see if I can get my dogs to stop barking at my neighbors’ cats.

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