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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http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/dont-panic-its-only-linux-30/9276?alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE

What was Google thinking!?

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | July 24, 2011, 3:45pm PDT

Summary

Google has been deleting some Google+ accounts. While Google have a right to do so, they certainly could have handled it better.

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When I first read Violet Blue’s account of Google kicking some Google+ users out of their new social network, my first reaction was “What the he… heck Google! After due consideration, I’m no longer surprised though. In fact, I can see Google’s point.

First, Google said from the start that while “Google services … support three types of use: unidentified, pseudonymous and identified” when it comes to Google+, Google “requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life.”

More specifically, Google states “To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.”

It appears a good number of people have been hammered for not using their ‘real’ names. This isn’t new. Back on July 8th, Google zapped the account of “Opensource Obscure,” the Second Life nom-de-plume of an Italian user. That said, Google appears to be willing to let you back in if you can prove your identity.

In addition, Google may zap your account if you it for “couples or groups of people. Additionally, you can’t create a profile for a non-person entity such as a pet or business.” But then again, they might not. In the very next line, Google states, “Google may continue to allow existing profiles that don’t meet these criteria, as long as the profile names are unchanged.”

Of course, “Pretending to be someone else could cause your profile to be deleted.” So forget about impersonating someone else on Google+. Your account can also be blown away for spam, gambling, sexually explicit material, bullying behavior and so on. Last, but far from least, you can’t have multiple Google+ identities.

You know what? For the most part this all makes sense to me. While anonymity can be vital for some individuals all too often it’s used to simply hide mean-spirited trolls that make so many online communities utterly distasteful.

Besides, when push comes to shove, Google Plus is Google’s system. They set up their rules, some people broke them, and now they’re out. That’s life. If you don’t like it, set up your own online community.

OK, so I can see where Google is coming from, but that’s not the end of the story by a long shot. I think Google has badly mishandled this.

For starters, I don’t think people should be required to use their real names. Yes, I get how poisonous anonymous users can be to a social network. There’s a middle way though.

As Anil Dash writes in his essay on how social Websites can go badly wrong, anonymous users are a bad idea, but “Your site should have accountable identities. No, people don’t have to use their real names, or log in with Google or Facebook or Twitter unless you want them to. But truly anonymous commenting often makes it really easy to have a pile of sxxx on your website, especially if you don’t have dedicated community moderators. When do newspapers publish anonymous sources? When the journalists know the actual identity and credibility of the person, and decide it is a public good to protect their identity. You may wish to follow the same principles, or you can embrace one of my favorite methods of identity: Persistent pseudonyms. Let users pick a handle that is attached to all of their contributions in a consistent way where other people can see what they’ve done on the site. Don’t make reputation a number or a score, make it an actual representation of the person’s behavior.”

For example, when Pamela “PJ” Jones set up Groklaw, the intellectual property law news and analysis site, she kept her real life identity separate from the Web site. Despite numerous attempts to invade her privacy, no one with any sense doubted that PJ was a real person and that she stood behind her analysis and opinions.

So, if someone really wants to be “Linux Guru,” on Google+ fine. Let them. Just make sure they know that their Google Profile e-mail will be tied forevermore to “Linux Guru” on Google+.

Next, as ex-Google employee Kirrily “Skud” Robert, who had the “pleasure” of being knocked off the Google+ service, Google is turning off these accounts without letting people know why they’re being switched off. Worse still, “Honestly, if Google’s support people tell me that’s what I need to do [to get my Google+ account], I will do so.”

Google, as far as I can tell, hasn’t issued any kind of statement on what’s going on with this wave of account deletions or what steps someone should take to get their account back on. Instead, it seems to be handling in an off-hand, make-it-up as we go along way.

That’s not good enough. If Google wants Google Plus to be taken seriously, they need to do more than just state policies in Web documents. They need to set up a real user management system. As Robert concluded, “It would be nice if Google would provide the same sort of understanding toward us, by erring on the side of caution when wielding the ban-hammer, as we try and figure out how the system works based on, quite frankly, very little clear information.”

Amen!

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/what-was-google-thinking/1274

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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Could you do Linus “Linux” Torvalds job?

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http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/top-five-linux-contributor-microsoft/9254