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Not everyone's open to Linus
LinuxWorld.com 8/9/00
Linus Torvalds's BOF (birds of a feather) session on Linux at USENIX in
San Diego this year was unlike any other speech I have seen him give. For one thing, he spoke to a partially hostile crowd; ordinarily, he speaks before crowds that adore him. Also, this wasn't a keynote address on opening day, but a BOF session at 8:15 p.m. on the next-to-last day of the conference. One constant, however, was Torvalds's ability to calmly address touchy "red button" issues, which he did time and again. |
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FreeBSD dominated the FREENIX track at USENIX. Ill will between fans of the two free Unix siblings (Linux and FreeBSD) was evident in the room. I sat in the second row of the audience and watched the room slowly fill up. Two BSD supporters sat down in front of me, less than 20 feet from the small platform where Torvalds would be speaking. The first thing they did after getting settled was mime blowing darts at the platform. Actually, mime is not the right word --they also added the "phhhhhhhhhft. . . thud!" sound effects.
Torvalds started to ease such animosity before his talk even began. Just before Torvalds's speech, a BSD supporter offered him, almost as a challenge, a pair of red BSDaemon horns, which were seen in abundance at the show. Much to the delight of many BSD users in the crowd, Torvalds smiled and put the horns on his head, where they remained for the entire session.
Torvalds's talk also differed from his standard fare. Usually, he gives an update on the status of the kernel, then opens the floor to questions from the audience. It is this give-and-take with the audience he seems to enjoy the most. This time he gave a brief kernel update, including a mention of how well Linux 2.4 was scaling upward in the SMP world, and then summoned several well-known Linux hackers to the stage to help handle the audience's questions. Stephen C. Tweedie, Ted Ts'o, and others came forward. Miguel de Icaza was called up as well, but must have been absent from the hall, for he never appeared onstage.
Tweedie acted as a foil for Torvalds. Torvalds is cheerful and perpetually optimistic; Tweedie is dark, somber, and cautious. When Torvalds spoke of the wonderful improvements in scalability gained by getting rid of the "big spin lock" in the SMP code, Tweedie fretted that there were still bugs to be found and fixed as a result.
Controversy reared its head again when a young man -- who spoke as though he represented the Free Software Foundation (FSF), although this is unconfirmed -- requested that Torvalds ask Lucent to use the GPL for Plan 9, an experimental OS recently released under a Lucent open source license. Apparently, the same gentleman had disrupted an earlier session at the conference with strident demands that the Lucent license be abandoned in favor of the GPL.
When Torvalds deflected the question with a terse "Let's not go there," the man retreated briefly, but then returned to the microphone to denounce the use of the phrase "open source" in describing Plan 9. After the young man's final comments, Tweedie drew some applause when he called Plan 9 "lovely software," and said it may well become a rule that for software to be considered good, it must first be attacked by the FSF.
Tweedie is, among other things, working on a journaling filesystem for Linux called ext3. This has put him in the midst of one of the most contentious debates among Linux kernel hackers concerning the 2.4 release: should the ReiserFS (a journaling filesystem) be included with 2.4?
Much to the dismay of Hans Reiser, while Torvalds was on a recent three-week vacation, Alan Cox decided to delay the integration of both the ReiserFS and the NWFS into the 2.4 release, leaving that decision to Torvalds. This in spite of the fact that SuSE has already included the ReiserFS as an install option in their latest release, SuSE 6.4, and after internal SuSE testing, swears by its reliability.
Much of the debate has focused on the alliances of the principals: Cox, Tweedie, and Reiser. Cox and Tweedie both work for Red Hat. SuSE enjoys a closer relationship with Reiser than does its main rival, Red Hat. SuSE's inclusion of Reiser's journaling filesystem gives the company a big leg up on the long-awaited addition of a journaling filesystem to Linux.
All of this led Reiser to suggest on the linux-kernel mailing list that the reasons for his filesystem not being merged were political rather than technical.
Torvalds did not deal with the ReiserFS controversy during the BOF -- at least not before I retired for the night in order to catch a 6:30 a.m. flight. However, he seems to have since done so. When I asked Torvalds to comment on Reiser's claims, he replied:
There are never "no technical reasons." ReiserFS seems to be used widely enough (just look at all the discussion on linux-kernel) and has been available long enough that it could be included. So basically the technical reasons to include it are there, and that's kind of a pre-requisite.
The "political" reasons are then reasons that make it more or less likely to be included, once the technical reasons are there. And there's a number of these reasons that make me more inclined to include ReiserFS. The obvious one is just the fact that everybody knows that a lot of people want a journaling filesystem, and it would be nice for PR/mindshare/whatever-you-call-it reasons to have something like ReiserFS.
There are other alternatives -- ext3, JFS, the list goes on. The reason I like ReiserFS is that development of ReiserFS has been the most open, and I've seen it on the net along with user reports, etc., unlike the others. Which makes me feel that ReiserFS is the one most likely to be merged first.
That said, I don't know when the merge will happen. It will almost certainly happen during 2.4.x, but the question is whether it happens before 2.4.0, or whether it is going to be part of one of the 2.4.x updates.
The Torvalds BOF presentation may have been atypical -- it certainly didn't happen in front of an adoring Linux crowd -- but Torvalds demonstrated the hallmark traits that have made him, and Linux, so wildly popular.
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