Kernels meeting in the middle?
Andy Tanenbaum's talk on microkernels was, IMO, really cool. The
interesting thing to me was that this almost exactly mirrored Van
Jacobsen's talk at LCA 2006 on
speeding
up network access by moving the network drivers out of the kernel.
Not only did this speed network access up, but it also removed a whole
bunch of ugly locking stuff from the kernel, improving its quality as
well. Another side benefit of this was that you could now run half a
dozen network processes instead of one. With architectures like Sun's
Niagara, Intel's quad cores and many other systems getting many cores
on the same chip, this is going to deliver an increasing speed-up.
It occurs to me that this is the other good thing of Minix. The disk driver, the network driver and the screen driver can all run at full speed because they get 100% of their own CPU time. Separating these out onto separate processes that can run on separate CPUs will deliver better scaling than bloated kernels that have every driver and every system all bundled together. To me, this is not really a problem for Linux - we already have proof that these trends are happening. Linux might have a larger kernel, but we're meeting microkernels in the middle.
For Windows, though, I'd say that it will become increasingly obvious
that it just can't compete on reliability and scaling in the area that
they so desperately want to get into: the server market. The annoying
thing about this is that it
won't really matter, because Microsoft knows who to market to (the
upper management who don't read technical journals) and have the budget
to make anything look good. The fight is still on, but it's still not
between Linux and Minix. Sorry, Marc,
stirring that particular pot again does not get you any kudos.
posted at: 10:51 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
Submitting patches and watching devices
Two more excellent talks at the LinuxChix miniconf - how to work on
open source if you're not a programmer and how to understand PCI if
you're not a hardware hacker. It was amusing to see that the small
room the miniconf has has been constantly full, with people often
having to sit on side tables or stand in order to watch. For the
latter talk in particular, a huge contingent of guys turned up to
listen and strained the capacity of a room that had been boosted
with lots of extra chairs. Very cool.
One of the key elements that has come out of the LinuxChix miniconf (in my opinion) is that social networking is just as important as digital networking. Part of this is meeting and greeting, something that even if LCA was twice as big would still be just as awesome. Another part is the smoothing of feathers, the shaking of hands, the stroking of egos - the little things that sometimes you have to do to get patches accepted or problems resolved. One trick which Val Henson mentioned is to submit a patch with one or two obvious errors (like submitting it in the wrong format) - then the developers can feel all important and tell you you did it wrong, and you quietly submit the correct patch and everyone feels happy.
Logically, it shouldn't have to be this way. Open Source prides itself on the idea that anyone can modify, anyone can help. But this, as Sulamita Garcia (the first LinuxChix speaker) pointed out, is a fiction - the reality is flame wars, shouting matches, and sexist comments. Getting patches accepted can often be as much a knowing who to talk to as what format to submit it in. A woman going along to a LUG meeting for the first time can be, as Sulamita described it, akin to the scene in the spaghetti western where the stranger walks into the bar and everything stops. This must change if we're to be anywhere as equal and egalitarian as we claim to be.
And certainly for men it's sometimes a huge struggle. I think of myself as a feminist and consciously support equality and fairness, yet I still make the same mistakes as all the other guys I personally shrink away from. And even after this example, when you'd think I should have put a cork in my mouth, I was still putting my foot in instead.
At the last session of the LinuxChix miniconf, where we went to the library lawn to sit in the dappled sunlight and talked about how difficult it is to get a fair rate of pay. This followed on from Val Henson's talk on negotiation and knowing how to get what you deserve, which was excellent and (I feel) applied to the wider community of computing workers. Mary Gardiner organised us into small groups and specifically cautioned the men in the groups to not talk too much (which would have been a good idea even if it wasn't a LinuxChix miniconf). So we start introducing ourselves, and what do I do?
Go into a long and tedious ramble about the pains of one of my previous jobs.
Mary, the lady organising our group, gently interrupted me and moved on, and I realised my error. Andre Pang, who was also in the group, was much better than I at keeping quiet and letting the women[1] talk. I silently made the motions of putting a cork in my mouth and managed, I think, to restrain myself.
Why must my urge to speak and be heard fight with my desire to be fair and equal?
[1] - Women?
Ladies? Girls? Females? Whatever term I choose, I hit the age-old
problem of them having social connotations.
posted at: 08:59 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
The invisible macho danger
I worked out that there were 38 women and 12 men for the first session
of the LinuxChix miniconf. In the question time, it came out that
the FOSSPOS study (I've yet to find it on the intarweb) showed that
FOSS and Linux has an order of magnitude fewer women compared to
the rest of the IT industry. And yet, when I asked my question "why is
this?" Val Henson pointed out to us that, even with that
proportion of women in the room, all of the questions up to and
including mine had been asked by men.
Ouch.
posted at: 08:55 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.