Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

And exactly as in the theory of relativity, two people on different CPU's can actually validly _disagree_ about the ordering of the same event. There are things that act as "light-cones" and are borders for what everybody can agree on, but basically, in the absence of explicit locks, it is very possible that no such thing as "ordering" may even exist.

-- Linus Torvalds

-	early_printk("Kernel really alive\n");
+	early_printk("Kernel really alive! It's alive! IT'S ALIIIIIIIIIVE!\n");

-- Bill Nottingham

Still experimental, not for inclusion, but given that I am now finding more bugs in the rest of Linux than in this code, I suspect that it is getting close.

-- Paul McKenney (Thanks to Steven Rostedt)

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Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 25, 2008 14:05 UTC (Thu) by sayler (guest, #3164) [Link]

"And exactly as in the theory of relativity, two people on different CPU's can actually validly _disagree_ about the ordering of the same event. There are things that act as "light-cones" and are borders for what everybody can agree on, but basically, in the absence of explicit locks, it is very possible that no such thing as "ordering" may even exist. "

There's a famous paper that Linus may be referring to.. Leslie Lamport's "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System"

http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~shenoy/courses/spring05/reading...

is one place where you can pick it up.