Linux Kernel Monkey Log

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

See more ...

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.

See more ...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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Back in July last year, I wrote a paper for the Linux Symposium about who was doing the actual work in the Linux kernel. Today the Linux Foundation has released a new version of it that contains new data, as well as a lot better writing thanks to Jon Corbet of lwn.net and Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation.

The paper was released in both html form, and a PDF version for those who like the pretty graphs to be a bit bigger.

It seems that the trade press has picked this up already, with reviews by the 451 group, internetnews.com, cnet, and infoworld, as well as lwn.net.

Funny note, companies are now emailing me complaining that we aren't counting their contributions properly. Hey, the numbers don't lie, take a look at the tools and logs I used to create all of this if you don't believe them.

To be fair to one company, Google, we were incorrectly counting their representation, keeping Andrew Morton in the "Linux Foundation" bucket instead of the "Google" bucket. That will change the list of top companies placing Google somewhere between 10 and 13, I haven't re-run the numbers yet to get the exact placement.

I've been carting the "big wall of kernel developers" poster around the world with me for the past 6 months, getting it signed by as many kernel developers as I could find.

First off was the Ottawa Linux Symposium, where the poster was unleashed apon an unsuspecting crowd of people. They mostly just laughed at it, and I had to update a few names by hand for some late patches that slipped in:

At that conference, which had around 600 attendees, I collected 101 different signatures. That ment that 1 out of every 6 people attending that conference, had gotten a patch into the last kernel version that had just come out (2.6.22 at the time.) That's quite a high concentration all in one spot.

I then displayed it at 2007 OSCON. While a fun conference, it is not very kernel oriented at all, and so, I picked up a few more signatures, mostly from Ubuntu people who happened to be attending due to a recent conference.

After that, it was a jump over the pond to the 2007 Linux kernel summit in Cambridge. I collected a few more signatures there, after having to clear off one whole wall of the conference room, much to the hotel's dismay.

Then, it was a few more plane rides, having it get lost by the airline between London and Hamburg, a train ride to Nuremburg, and then a bus ride to the Czech countryside for a SuSE Labs conference. Once again, the hotel staff looked at me strange, but they eventually found a way to set it up, and a few more signatures were aquired.

In the end, I collected 165 signatures, and the poster traveled with me to five different countries.

But today, I finally said goodbye to it. I sent it off in the mail to linux.conf.au, where it is to be raffled off for charity, after collecting a few more signatures that it is missing.

If you see it, say hello, for after lugging it on more airlines that I want to recall, and having to explain it to more airport security people than should have been necessary, it feels strange to not have to tote it after me anymore.

Maybe I'll go create a new poster for all of the work that happened in 2007 in the kernel, that one should only run about 50 meters long and give me something new to lug around the world again...

There was a lot of very good press coverage over my last announcement of the restart of the Linux Driver Project and my involvement in it now full time. It's been a few weeks since that announcement, and we now have over 300 different developers signed up to help create, and maintain Linux drivers!

I've also posted a short status report about the current projects, and what is going on with them. Since then, one more project has started, and there are a handful still in the planning stage.

What we need now is more companies participating in the project, we have the developers, but not enough work to keep them busy.

So how do we change this? I'm thinking that possibly, there really isn't a large number of different devices out there that need Linux support written for them.

As proof of this, I give you the Linux Foundation's Vendor Advisory Board. This group of companies publish a list of priorities that they feel need to be worked on in order to help Linux succeed.

Coming in at number 3 is "Device Driver Support". So, I approached this group and asked them specifically what devices did they see in common use that are not supported by Linux (the obvious 2 video cards being a known exception.) Despite this being such a high priority for this group, they had no examples to provide.

And neither do I. I don't currently know of any common piece of hardware in use today that is not supported on Linux. And since these vendors do not know, and I don't, I'm asking the world to help out.

So, please, let me know what specific type of device you know of that is not properly supported on Linux. If you want, please mark up the wiki page at:

Or just email me with your recommendations. If patterns emerge, I'll approach the companies and ask them if they will work with us.

Hopefully with your help, we can find some work for these 310 developers to do :)

Way back in January, I announced a program to write Linux drivers for companies for free. When I did that, I never expected the response to be as large as it was.

It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out.

I never imagined that so many different people would offer to help out. There is a real need for a place where developers can find a "real" project to work on in the Linux kernel. The Kernel Janitors project is a great place to start out, but what to do from there? It turns out that over 100 different developers offered up their services. Clearly this was a huge untapped group of talented people who wanted to help out.

Also, the number of companies expressing interest in this has exceeded all of my wildest expectations. Already this announcement has caused a number of drivers to end up in the main Linux kernel source tree, with more in the pipeline.

But unfortunately, I was not able to handle all of these different developers and company requests on my own. I had a full-time job, and a full part-time hobby doing Linux kernel development. These requests ended up going unanswered, and I sincerely apologize for that.

Now this has all changed.

My employer, Novell, has modified my position to now allow me to work full time on this project. Namely getting more new Linux kernel drivers written, for free, for any company that so desires. And to help manage all of the developers and project managers who want to help out.

We have kicked off the project again with this announcement on the mailing list set up for the developers wishing to help out.

If you want to join this group of people, or are a company wanting a free Linux driver written for them, please see our new web page at:

and follow the instructions there on how to join in.

I can't thank the people who have helped make this possible at Novell enough. They really care about helping make Linux support as many devices as possible, with fully opensource drivers.

Now let's get busy writing code...