Items tagged with Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds has never been one to mince words. Sometimes he can be a little too brash in his opinion, a trait he acknowledged before taking a brief hiatus for some soul searching. He is also extremely knowledgeable. A bit of both (brashness and knowledge) came out in a series of forum posts discussing ARM hardware and servers. Straight to the point, Linus believes that without a development platform, "ARM in the server space is never going to make it." Furthermore, he calls the attempt to pitch ARM as a 64-bit hyperscaling model is "idiotic," in part because of the lack of customers in that space. On top of it all, Intel is a juggernaut in the server sector, so pricing doesn't play that big...
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It looks as though Linus Torvalds needs a cooling off period. After a number of public outbursts online and raging against tech titans, Torvalds announced this weekend that he is temporarily stepping away from his current responsibilities of maintaining the Linux kernel to work on his personal behavior. In a post, Torvalds explained that his conduct with regards to how he treats the people that he works with and others in the industry hasn't exactly been productive. Things came to a head when he had a scheduling conflict for the Linux kernel maintainership summit. Although it was eventually rescheduled, Torvalds' rather dismissive reaction to the initial conflict in private and...
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Earlier this week, it was widely reported that AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors are susceptible to over a dozen exploits that attack the on-chip Secure Processor and the supporting chipset. The security bulletin, issued by Israeli research firm CTS Labs, promoted a direct response from AMD: We have just received a report from a company called CTS Labs claiming there are potential security vulnerabilities related to certain of our processors. We are actively investigating and analyzing its findings. This company was previously unknown to AMD and we find it unusual for a security firm to publish its research to the press without providing a reasonable amount of time for the company to investigate...
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Intel has been taking heat for patches that it deployed for the Spectre and Meltdown chip flaws. Recently deployed patches have resulted in some systems being subjected to random rebooting. However, Linus Torvalds is blasting Intel for another consequence of its patching regimen. In Torvalds' words, the patches are complete garbage. "They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense," said Torvalds. "I think we need something better than this garbage." He made these comments via a public Linux kernel mailing list that included Amazon engineer David Woodhouse. Torvalds is of course talking about the patches and how they are implemented for the Linux kernel to address Spectre...
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Chip-level bugs Meltdown and Spectre continue to land chip-maker Intel in hot water. What do you do when every single chip you’ve produced since 1995 is now facing two of the most pervasive bugs your company has possibly ever experienced? Linux creator Linus Torvald brazenly suggests, honesty and complete candid admission of the real issues and solutions at hand, are the only true ways for Intel to navigate this PR and logistics nightmare. Earlier in the week, it was discovered that the two flaws exist in the company's chips dating back a decade or more. Intel has since been scrambling to clean things up on both the PR and technical side. Through Meltdown and Spectre hackers can access...
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If you're a Linux fan, then you should know that this week is a very special one. On August 25, 1991 - 25 years ago - Linus Torvalds shot out a simple message to a Minix usergroup which stated that he was working on a Minix replacement. Within, he famously said that his creation wouldn't "be big and professional like GNU". Not even Linus Torvalds could have predicted what his OS - eventually called Linux - would become. While it might have taken a little while to get off the ground in a big way, Linux was a pet project that had no goals of world domination, but over time, that eventually happened anyway. To say that Linux is "everywhere" would be accurate. Android users are using a variant of...
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Some of the reactions to Apple's decision to make OS X 10.9 Mavericks a free upgrade have been a little over the top, especially in relation to Windows, which we think will be just fine in this so-called "new era," as the Cupertino company calls it. However, if we're talking about free software, Linux certainly needs to be in the discussion. During a question and answer session at LinuxCon Europe in Edinburg on Wednesday, Linus Torvalds pointed out that Linux has been free for over two decades," NetworkWorld reports. However, Apple's move into pro bono territory isn't the same as the philosophy behind Linux, he says. It's one of the reasons why he uses the term "open source" rather than "free...
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Following what Linus Torvalds called a "very quiet" week, the Finnish American open-source software guru officially released the Linux 3.9 kernel. The latest kernel had been in development for 10 weeks and includes a device mapper target that allows a user to configure a solid state drive (SSD) as a cache for hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase system performance. The release comes a week later than Torvalds would have liked, though he seemed more concerned with people trying to "game the system" than with the slight delay. Image Source: Flickr (LuChOeDu) "So the last week was much quieter than the preceding ones, which makes me suspect that one reason -rc7 was bigger than I liked was that people...
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After getting delayed a couple of days, the Linux 3.8 kernel is all polished and ready to go, Linus Torvalds announced. The big new feature in the 3.8 kernel is F2FS (Flash-Friendly File system), a new file system designed specifically to take advantage of NAND flash memory-based storage devices, such as solid state drives (SSDs). "NAND flash memory-based storage devices, such as SSD, eMMC, and SD cards, have been widely being used for ranging from mobile to server systems. Since they are known to have different characteristics from the conventional rotational disks, a file system, an upper layer to the storage device, should adapt to the changes from the sketch," Samsung's Jaegeuk Kim explained....
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It took a little longer than Linus Torvalds would have liked, but after a last minute delay and an extra Release Candidate (RC) release, Linux 3.7 is all polished up and out in final form. Torvalds initially hoped to roll out Linux 3.7 last week, but said he was "uncomfortable" with the release candidate due to some last-minute issues, most notably the resurrection of a kswapd issue. That prompted him to build an eighth RC. "Whee. After an extra RC release, 3.7 is now out. After a few more trials at fixing things, in the end we ended up reverting the kswapd changes that caused problems. And with the extra RC, I had decided to risk doing the buffer.c cleanups that would otherwise have just been...
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Just over two months ago, Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.6 kernel in final form, opting to push it out to the public rather than building what would have been an eighth Release Candidate. At the time, he said he couldn't think of a major reason to do yet another RC. Since then, work has shifted to Linux 3.7, and this time around Torvalds is reluctantly building an eighth RC, he announced this week. "I really didn't want it to come to this, but I was uncomfortable doing the 3.7 release yesterday due to last-minute issues, and decided to sleep on it," Torvalds state on a message board. "And today, I ended up even *less* comfortable about it due to the resurrection of a kswapd issue, so I decided...
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While we spent Sunday watching the Patriots beat up on the Bills, Linus Torvalds was busy putting the final touches on the Linux 3.6 kernel, which he released in final form to the public yesterday afternoon. He had previously contemplated building one more Release Candidate, which would have been the eighth, but after a week since announcing an rc8 build might be in the works, Torvalds said he couldn't find a major reason to do another RC. "So here it is, 3.6 final. Sure, I'd have been happier with even fewer changes, but that just never happens. And holding off the release until people get too bored to send me the small stuff just makes the next merge window more painful," Torvalds explained...
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It's said the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but if that doesn't work, you could always try being vulgar. The tactic worked for Linus Torvalds, who not that long ago ripped into NVIDIA for its lack of Linux support. He was answering a student developer's question about NVIDIA driver support for Linux on her notebook during a talk at Finland's Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship. Torvalds at the time said NVIDIA is "the single worst company we've ever dealt with," and then proceeded to flip NVIDIA the bird on camera while dropping an f-bomb. Here we are about three months later and suddenly NVIDIA is paying more attention to Linux by porting its Optimus technology to the open source platform. "So...
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