linux kernel monkey log

Linux Driver Project Status Report as of June 2009

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:14:00 GMT

This is a status report for the Linux Driver Project as of June 2009, describing what has happened in the past year of work. It was originally posted on the Linux Driver Project developer mailing list.

Loving the 'droid

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:57:00 GMT

The 2.6.29 kernel release is now out, and if you look closely, there are a number of drivers for the Android platform merged in, starting with this patch.

Yes, there's still a lot to go, like cleaning up the user/kernel interfaces, and prodding the core Android developers to start working upstream more, which they have already started to do. It's a great start, and one that I hope will succeed overall, as it really is a nice system to develop for, and one the phone manufacturers have been asking for from the Linux community, for years.

And besides, how can you not like such a cute robot:

The Linux Staging Tree, what it is and is not

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:42:00 GMT

It's been many months since the Linux Kernel developers conference, where the linux-staging tree was discussed and role changed. It turns out that people are still a bit confused as to what the staging tree is for, and how it works.

So here's a short summary, I'm not going into the history or background here, that's a much longer writeup that I'd be glad to do if people are interested.

The Linux Staging Tree, what it is and is not.

What the Linux Staging tree is

The Linux Staging tree (or just "staging" from now on) is used to hold stand-alone drivers and filesystems that are not ready to be merged into the main portion of the Linux kernel tree at this point in time for various technical reasons. It is contained within the main Linux kernel tree so that users can get access to the drivers much easier than before, and to provide a common place for the development to happen, resolving the "hundreds of different download sites" problem that most out-of-tree drivers have had in the past.

What the Linux Staging tree is not

The staging tree is not a place to dump code and run away, hoping that someone else will to the cleanup work for you. While there are developers available and willing to do this kind of work, you need to get them to agree to "babysit" the code in order for it to be accepted.

Location and Development

The staging tree is now contained within the main Linux kernel source tree at the location drivers/staging/. All development happens within the main kernel source tree, like any other subsystem within the kernel. This means:

The linux-next tree contains the latest version of the staging tree, with bugfixes that are about to be merged into Linus's tree, as well as the patches that are to be merged into the next major kernel release.
If you wish to do work on the staging tree, checkout the linux-next tree and send patches based on that.

Runtime

When code from the staging tree is loaded in the kernel, a warning message will be printed to the kernel log saying:

MODULE_NAME: module is from the staging directory, the quality is unknown, you have been warned.

and the kernel will be tainted with the TAINT_CRAP flag. This flag shows up in any kernel oops that might be produced after the driver has been loaded.

Note, most kernel developers have expressed the warning that they will not work on bugs for when this taint flag has happened, so if you run into a kernel problem after loading such a module, please work to reproduce the issue without a staging module loaded in order to be able to get help from the community.

If anyone has any questions that this summary doesn't answer, please let me know.

I write too much email

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:55:00 GMT

A few years ago, when one of my kids was asked what their dad did for work, they replied, "Sit in the basement and write email."

It's not that far from the truth.

I looked back at my mail server logs for 2008 to see just how much email I did write. For 2008, it turned out that I wrote 19057 unique emails.

Yes, that's an average of about 52 emails a day, and no, that is not a number of individual recipients (one email sent to three people was counted as one email, not three.)

I do send out a lot of patches for review (for -stable trees, and for when patches get sent to Linus for inclusion in the main kernel tree), and I also send out a bunch of "Now that you got a patch into the Linux kernel, we were wondering who you work for", type emails to help lwn.net with their statistic gathering.

But that doesn't justify the numbers overall, I just think I have a bad habit.

Here's a breakdown of emails sent by the time of day for the whole year:

You can pretty clearly see when I go eat dinner and then switch over to using my laptop in the evening (time zone is local time of the day.)

When I tried to graph per day, you can kind of see lower numbers on the weekends if you squint:

I guess it's no wonder that Google thinks my email address is a spam-bot and refuses to let me sign up for any google groups with it. I think it is trying to tell me to cut down on my output or something.

Clearly I need help...

bti: tweets from the command line

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:45:00 GMT

A while ago I talked about piping all of my bash commands to twitter.com. I've kind of stopped doing that now, after I maxed out at over 14000 updates in about 2 weeks, but it was fun while it lasted.

But in order to do this kind of thing nicely, I ended up writing a command line program to make it easier. Some people have noticed it at times, by poking around in my kernel.org home directory, so I might as well announce the thing publicly.

So, consider this an announcement of the tool, bti. It allows you to send tweets to twitter.com or identi.ca directly from the command line from any Linux machine. It probably works on other systems as well, but you will have to tweak the Makefile yourself.

The latest version can always be found here.

The development for the tool is done in git, and the tree can be found on the ever-awesome github.com in this repository.

avi to ogg?

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:17:00 GMT

As many people have pointed out to me, the posting of the Linux Plumbers Conference keynote on Google Video makes it kind of hard to watch using "free" software. So I tried to work out how to convert the original file to .OGG format.

And I failed.

So, any hints? Someone did this last time around for me for my talk at Google, which can be seen in the fancy new "media" directory on kernel.org right here. I'll be glad to put up the keynote talk, and some other videos that I have of talks if I can get them converted.

Update: Lots of people have pointed me to the excellent ffmpeg2theora tool, which I'm now using to convert the videos. Thanks for all of the help, I really appreciate it. I'll have copies of the videos up soon...

Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 Keynote

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:42:00 GMT

The video for my keynote has been published on Google Video, hopefully the other talks get posted there soon as well.

Too much Law and not enough Gospel

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:11:00 GMT

It was nice to see the large response from my Linux Plumbers Conference talk, and there seems to be a few common themes of questions about the talk that I figured I'd clear up here.

I have seen the video of the talk, and the video team from the Linux Plumbers Conference is working to put it up online somewhere, hopefully soon. I'll link to it when it is available.

First off, my numbers for the binutils development was completely WRONG. Kees and I sat down and tried to figure out exactly why I didn't count his valid contribution, and it turned out that binutils puts a ChangeLog into each subdirectory, the top-level one is not the summary of all of the individual parts of the project. So I apologize about that one, Canonical really did have one binutils patch in the past 3 years. Not that this really affects any of the main points of my talk though...

All of the other numbers for the other projects are still correct, from what I can tell. If anyone thinks I got them wrong, please let me know and I will be glad to review them. Feel free to review the changelog and svn and git trees of the different projects if want to verify.

One main question that I saw a lot, and was even asked about during my talk, was "what about Canonical's work on the desktop/Gnome/KDE"? I really don't know if they have contributed a lot of effort back upstream on these projects, that wasn't my point here.

Remember, this was given at the Linux Plumbers Conference a gathering of developers of the low-level plumbing of Linux. This wasn't a group of desktop developers, so remember the audience that this was addressed to please.

If Canonical has contributed a lot to Gnome/KDE, that's great, I'm sure someone will post the numbers soon to verify this. Either way, please remember that this was not the audience that I was addressing.

I sat down with Matt the day after my talk, as he described, and hopefully the Canonical kernel developers will work to become more of a valid part of the community, which is what I am sincerely hopeing will happen here.

Oh, and Amanda, I have given this very same kind of talk to Amazon, a number of months ago, as well as many other companies over the past 1 1/2 years, so it's not like I am ignoring them at all.

And this response brings me back to my main point of my talk, which most people seem to have missed as they were upset at me pointing out Canonical's lack of upstream contributions. And that point was, and still is:

The market right now is just too good for individual developers who have experience in writing open source software for Linux, especially the low-level plumbing of Linux, to waste their time working for companies who do not allow them to contribute back, if they want to.

This was a developer conference. I am a developer, talking as myself only, and not as a representative of any company (note the total lack of any corporate branding on my slides), to other developers who I totally respect and want to see be as happy in their day-job as I am in mine.

I would like to point out that lwn.net's summary of the talk did get this correct, which was great to see.

Hopefully this helps clear things up, if not, let me know and I'll be glad to address it.

Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 Keynote

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:44:00 GMT

I was honored to give the opening keynote of the first Linux Plumbers Conference this year in Portland, Oregon. Here's the slides and text of my talk (well, the text is what I intended to say, the actual words that came out probably sounded a bit different.)

I'll comment later on a few things that I've noticed people bringing up, but I figured it would be good to get the text and slides out for everyone to be able to see first.

The talk was recorded, and I'll provide a link to it when it is available so you can compare it to what I have below.

If you want to link directly to this talk, please use this link.

Update: I've responded to some of the response about this talk here.

Update 2: The video has now been published on Google Video.

Position Statement on Linux Kernel Modules

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:59:00 GMT

As part of the Linux Foundation Technical board, we confront the issue of closed source Linux kernel modules all the time, and we wanted to do something that could be seen as a general "public statement" about them that is easy to understand and point to when people have questions.

So, after working on this for a while, and asking some of the other major contributors and maintainers of the kernel, what we have is below.

There is also a site that contains a link to a statement from the Linux Foundation about this topic, as well as some more descriptions and background information, and a copy of the full statement as well.

I've also put a pretty pdf version here in case people want to print it out.

If there are any kernel developers who want to add their names to this statement, please let me know by private email and I will be glad to add it.

Linux Plumbers Conference 2008

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:29:00 GMT

The Linux Plumbers Conference has announced that registration is now open, and the call for papers has also gone out.

This conference was created by a bunch of Linux people living in Portland, Oregon with the goal of having a technical conference in the US that deals with the low-level "plumbing" issues relating to the whole Linux system. This includes the kernel, udev, HAL, dbus, xorg, pulse audio, and other related things.

It's a non-profit conference, with all of the money raised for it from registration fees and sponserships going directly into the conference itself to try to provide a good experience.

I'm running one of the "microconference" tracks dealing with the fun around the Linux kernel/userspace interface issues. If you are interested in presenting a talk about this issue, be sure to let me know.

Linux kernel development talk

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:31:00 GMT

Ever since my talk at OLS last year about the Linux kernel development community and the companies involved, I've been traveling around, giving the talk in one form or another to lots of different companies and community groups.

Last week I gave the talk at Google, and they kindly recorded it and put it up for everyone to see.

So, if you're curious about the current state of the Linux kernel when it comes to how fast it is going, who is doing the work, who is sponsoring the work, and why that matters to your company, sit back and enjoy the talk.

Oh, the slides are right here if you really want to see them. Without the context of the talk they really don't mean that much, but people seem to always want to see them.

I also did an interview for linux-magazin.de a month or so ago, and that is also online now as well.

Maybe now I will no longer have to travel around so much...

linux-staging kernel tree

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:16:00 GMT

Yes, yet-another-linux-kernel-patch-set.

This one is for code that is good enough to build and run, but not good enough to get merged into the main kernel.org tree just yet.

See the announcement for more details if you are interested in adding patches to this tree, or in finding new kernel projects to work on.

what I am doing, RIGHT NOW

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:14:00 GMT

I've been watching twitter for a while now, amused at the ability for it to keep people appraised of what you are doing at the moment, if they really care. I didn't think it was really worth it.

Until I read this post last night which was linked off of some site that I forgot (probably reddit but I did think it was from the every wonderful Arachaia, which if you are a programmer, you should be paying attention to.)

I just couldn't resist...

So, if you want to see what I am doing, RIGHT NOW (well what I just did, it waits for the command to complete before sending it off to twitter), you can follow along right here.

I'm only enabling it on a few of my terminal windows for now, watching me constantly run mutt and offlineimap would get a bit boring.

I wonder how long it's going to be before I type in my password accidentally to this thing. Or until twitter bans me. Any odds on which is going to happen first?

I pity anyone who subscribes to this twit feed, they are going to start hating me very quickly, like the Portland, Oregon local feed already has...

Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:52:00 GMT

This is a status report for the Linux Driver Project as of April 2008, describing what has happened in the past year of work. It was originally posted on the developer mailing list.