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linux.conf.au 2009

The 2009 linux.conf.au was held in Hobart, on the island of Tasmania. The setting for LCA - typically on a university campus - is always nice, but it is hard to imagine a more beautiful place to meet than Hobart. As an added bonus, the mild temperatures offered a nice complement to both (1) the brutally high temperatures being felt on the Australian mainland, and (2) the rather severe winter conditions awaiting your editor on his return. A number of talks from LCA 2009 have been covered in separate articles; here your editor will summarize a few other things worth mentioning.

Prior to the event, your editor heard a few people express disappointment over the choice of keynote speakers this time around. As it happens, at least some of that disappointment was premature. It is true that things got off to a bit of a slow start on the first day, when Thomas Limoncelli delivered a hand-waving talk about "scarcity and abundance." Thomas is a good and entertaining speaker, but he seemed to think that he was addressing a gathering of system administrators, so his talk missed the mark. Unfortunately, your editor got waylaid and missed Angela Beesley's keynote on the second day.

The speaker for the final day was Sun's Simon Phipps. Your editor entered this talk with low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised. Simon is an engaging speaker, and he would appear to understand our community well. As might be expected, he glossed over some of Sun's more difficult community interactions, choosing instead to focus on more positive things and the interaction between the community and companies in general.

Simon's thesis is that we're heading into a "third wave" of free software. The first wave started, perhaps, before Richard Stallman wrote the GNU Manifesto; Simon notes that IBM's unbundling of the software for its nascent PC offering (in response to antitrust problems) played a huge role in defining the software market of the 1980's. But the Free Software Foundation brought a lot of things into focus and started the ball rolling for real. The second wave came about roughly with the founding of the Apache Software Foundation; that was when the world came to understand that free software developers can produce high-quality code. He gave Ubuntu as an example, and noted that even the Gartner Group has come to see some value in free software.

The third wave is coming as businesses really figure out how to work with free software. In his point of view, the right way is to do everything to drive adoption of the software; again, Canonical was held up as an example of how to do it right. One should only sell licenses, he says, to businesses who haven't figured out the true value of free software. Why, he asks, should a company which understands things buy RHEL or SLES licenses? (It's worth noting that a Red Hat representative took issue with that comment, not without reason).

"Third wave" businesses should work with something like a subscription model, selling support services as needed. Things like defect resolution, preferably done by people who have commit privileges with the project involved. Businesses can make upgrades easier, provide production support tools, or, if really needed, sell indemnity guarantees.

Some concerns were raised, the first of which was licenses. While noting wryly that his company "has done lots of experimentation" with software licenses, Simon identified license proliferation as a big problem. In the future, he thinks, the problems associated with proliferation will tend to drive projects toward a single license - most likely the GPL.

Another problem is, of course, software patents. Simon says we shouldn't worry too much about patent trolls, though; there is not much we can do about them in any case. A much bigger concern is companies (unnamed) which are working as members of the community but which are, simultaneously, filing a stream of "parallel patents" covering the work they do. Should one of these companies turn against the community, it could create all kinds of problems. For this reason, Simon is a big fan of licenses like GPLv3 or the Apache license which include patent covenants. Every company which engages the community under the terms of such a license gives up some of its patent weaponry in the process. The more companies we can bring into this sort of "patent peace," the better off we will be.

Even so, he says, the day may come when the community needs a strong patron to defend it against a determined patent attack.

Simon then asked the audience to consider what it is that makes a company a true friend of free software. Is it just a matter of strapping on a penguin beak, as the Tasmanian devil has done to become the LCA2009 mascot? The real measure of friendship is contributions to the community; Sun, he pointed out, has done a lot in that regard. In closing, Simon's message to "third wave" businesses was to keep freedom in mind. There is a place, he says, for both pragmatism and radical idealism. The biggest enemy of freedom is a happy slave; he held up his Apple notebook as an example.

In response to questions, Simon noted that the license problems with the sunrpc code will hopefully be fixed soon. The problem is that this code is 25 years old and there's nobody around who worked on it at the time, so determining its origins is hard. He also said that "pressure is mounting" to release the ZFS filesystem under a GPL-compatible license. And he suggested that, eventually, Red Hat will have to start selling support services for Fedora, since that is the distribution that people are adopting.

Freedom was also at the top of the agenda during Rob Savoye's talk. He discussed the launch of the Open Media Now! Foundation, which has been formed to address the problem of codec patents head-on. As Rob puts it, we all create content, we should be able to give copies of our own content to anyone. In addition, the data we create never goes away, but our ability to read that data just might. Plus, he's simply fed up with hearing complaints that gnash does not work with YouTube videos; it works just fine, but they cannot distribute gnash with the requisite codecs.

To deal with this problem, the Foundation is starting a determined effort to gather prior art which can apply to existing codec patents. With any luck, some of the worst of them can be invalidated. But just as much effort is going into figuring out ways to work around codec patents. Most patents are tightly written; it's often possible to find a way to code an algorithm which falls outside of a given patent's claims. When a proper workaround is found (and determining "proper" is a job for a lawyer), the relevant patent can thereafter be ignored. It is a far easier, more certain, and more cost-effective way of dealing with software patents, so Rob thinks the community should be putting much more effort into finding workarounds. He hopes that people will join up with Open Media Now and help to make that happen.

Matthew Wilcox managed to fill a room with a standing-room-only crowd (and not much standing room, at that) despite being scheduled at the same time as Andrew Tridgell. His topic - solid-state drives - is clearly interesting to a lot of people. Matthew discussed some of the issues with these drives, many of which have been covered here in the past. Those problems are being slowly resolved by the manufacturers, but there is a different class of problems which is now coming to the fore. There are certain kinds of kernel overhead which one doesn't notice when an I/O operation takes milliseconds to complete. When that operation completes in microseconds, though, that kernel overhead can become a bottleneck. So he has been working on finding these problems and fixing them, but it is going to take a while. He made the interesting observation that, at SSD speeds, block I/O starts to look more like network traffic, and the kernel needs to adopt some of the same techniques to be able to keep up with the hardware.

The Penguin Dinner auction was back this year, after having been dropped from the schedule in 2008. The auction is always an interesting event, often involving people deciding to spend a few thousand dollars on a T-shirt after having consumed enough alcohol to make any such decision especially unwise. This year's auction beneficiary was the Save The Tasmanian Devil organization, which came away from the event somewhat richer than it had hoped. After a long series of bids, matching offers, and simple passing-the-hat in the crowd, a large consortium of bidders managed to get a total of nearly AU$40,000 pledged to this cause. There was one condition, though: Bdale Garbee not only had to lose his beard, but it had to be done at the hands of Linus Torvalds.

The "free as in beard" event happened on the last day of the conference. As was noted in the live Twitter feed being projected in the room, it was most surreal to sit in a room of 500 people all quietly watching a man shave. Bdale's wife, who took the picture which was nominally the object being auctioned, has made it clear that he will not be allowed to attend LCA unaccompanied again.

In 2010, linux.conf.au will, for the second time ever, not be held in Australia. The winning bid for next year came from Wellington, New Zealand - a setting which rivals Hobart in beauty. Mark your calendars for January 18 to 23; it should be a good time.

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LCA: Catching up with X.org

For years, linux.conf.au has been one of the best places to go to catch up with the state of the X Window System; the 2009 event was no exception. There was a big difference this time around, though. X talks have typically been all about the great changes which are coming in the near future. This time, the X developers had a different story: most of those great changes are done and will soon be heading toward a distribution near you.

Keith Packard's talk started with that theme. When he spoke at LCA2008, there were a few missing features in X.org. Small things like composited three-dimensional graphics, monitor hotplugging, shared graphical objects, kernel-based mode setting, and kernel-based two-dimensional drawing. One of the main things holding all of that work back was the lack of a memory manager which could work with the graphics processor (GPU). It was, Keith said, much like programming everything in early Fortran; doing things with memory was painful.

That problem is history; X now has a kernel-based memory management system. It can be used to allocate persistent objects which are shared between the CPU and the GPU. Since graphical objects are persistent, applications no longer need to make backup copies of everything; these objects will not disappear. Objects have globally-visible names, which, among other things, allows them to be shared between applications. They can even be shared between different APIs, with objects being transformed between various types (image, texture, etc.) as needed. It looks, in fact, an awful lot like a filesystem; there may eventually be a virtual filesystem interface to these objects.

This memory manager is, of course, the graphics execution manager, or GEM. It is new code; the developers first started talking about the need to start over with a new memory manager in March, 2008. The first implementation was posted in April, and the code was merged for the 2.6.28 kernel, released in December. In the process, the GEM developers dropped a lot of generality; they essentially abandoned the task of supporting BSD systems, for example ("sorry about that," says Keith). They also limit support to some Intel hardware at this point. After seeing attempts at large, general solutions fail, the GEM developers decided to focus on getting one thing working, and to generalize thereafter. There is work in progress to get GEM working with ATI chipsets, but that project will not be done for a little while yet.

[PULL QUOTE: Moving data between caches is very expensive, so caching must be managed with great care. This is a task they had assumed would be hard. "Unfortunately," says Keith, "we were right." END QUOTE] GEM is built around the shmfs filesystem code; much of the fundamental object allocation is done there. That part is easy; the biggest hassle turns out to be in the area of cache management. Even on Intel hardware, which is alleged to be fully cache-coherent, there are caching issues which arise when dealing with the GPU. Moving data between caches is very expensive, so caching must be managed with great care. This is a task they had assumed would be hard. "Unfortunately," says Keith, "we were right."

One fundamental design feature of GEM is the use of global names for graphical objects. Unlike previous APIs, GEM does not deal with physical addresses of objects in its API. That allows the kernel to move things around as needed; as a result, every application can work with the assumption that it has access to the full GPU memory aperture. Graphical objects, in turn, are referenced by "batch buffers," which contain sequences of operations for the GPU. The batch buffer is the fundamental scheduling unit used by GEM; by allowing multiple applications to schedule batch buffers for execution, the GEM developers hope to be able to take advantage of the parallelism of the GPU.

GEM replaces the "balkanized" memory management found in earlier APIs. Persistent objects eliminate a number of annoyances, such as the dumping of textures at every task switch. What is also gone is the allocation of the entire memory aperture at startup time; memory is now allocated as needed. And lots of data copying has been taken out. All told, it is a much cleaner and better-performing solution than its predecessors.

Getting this code into the kernel was a classic example of working well with the community. The developers took pains to post their code early, then they listened to the comments which came back. In the process of responding to reviews, they were able to make some internal kernel API changes which made life easier. In general, they found, when you actively engage the kernel community, making changes is easy.

The next step was the new DRI2 X extension, intended to replace the (now legacy) DRI extension. It only has three requests, enabling connection to the hardware and buffer allocation. The DRI shared memory area (and its associated lock) have been removed, eliminating a whole class of problems. Buffer management is all done in the X server; that makes life a lot easier.

Then, there is the kernel mode-setting (KMS) API - the other big missing piece. KMS gets user-space applications out of the business of programming the adapter directly, putting the kernel in control. The KMS code (merged for 2.6.29) also implements the fbdev interface, meaning that graphics and the console now share the same driver. Among other things, that will let the kernel present a traceback when the system panics, even if X is running. Fast user switching is another nice feature which falls out of the KMS merge. KMS also eliminates the need for the X server to run with root privileges, which should help security-conscious Linux users sleep better at night. The X server is a huge body of code which, as a rule, has never been through a serious security audit. It's a lot better if that code can be run in an unprivileged mode.

Finally, KMS holds out the promise of someday supporting non-graphical uses of the GPU. See the GPGPU site for information on the kinds of things people try to do once they see the GPU as a more general-purpose coprocessor.

All is not yet perfect, naturally. Beyond its limited hardware support, the new code also does not yet solve the longstanding "tearing" problem. Tearing happens when an update is not coordinated with the monitor's vertical refresh, causing half-updated screens. It is hard to solve without stalling the GPU to wait for vertical refresh, an operation which kills performance. So the X developers are looking at ways to context-switch the GPU. Then buffer copies can be queued in the kernel and caused to happen after the vertical refresh interrupt. It's a somewhat hard problem, but, says Keith, it will be fixed soon.

There is reason to believe this promise. The X developers have managed to create and merge a great deal of code over the course of the last year. Keith's talk was a sort of a celebration; the multi-year process of bringing X out of years of stagnation and into the 21st century is coming to a close. That is certainly an achievement worth celebrating.

Postscript: Keith's talk concerned the video output aspect of the X Window System, but an output-only system is not particularly interesting. The other side of the equation - input - was addressed by Peter Hutterer in a separate session. Much of the talk was dedicated to describing the current state of affairs on the input side of X. Suffice to say that it is a complex collection of software modules which have been bolted on over the years; see the diagram in the background of the picture to the right.

What is more interesting is where things are going from here. A lot of work is being done in this area, though, according to Peter, only a couple of developers are doing it. Much of the classic configuration-file magic has been superseded by HAL-based autoconfiguration code. The complex sequence of events which follows the attachment of a keyboard is being simplified. Various limits - on the number of buttons on a device, for example - are being lifted. And, of course, the multi-pointer X work (discussed at LCA2008) is finding its way into the mainline X server and into distributions.

The problems in the input side of X have received less attention, but it is still an area which has been crying out for work for some time. Now that work, too, is heading toward completion. For users of X (and that is almost all of us), life is indeed getting better.

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The new GCC runtime library exemption

As described in Plugging into GCC last October, the runtime library code used by the GCC compiler (which implements much of the basic functionality that individual languages need for most programs) has long carried a license exemption allowing it to be combined with proprietary software. In response to the introduction of version 3 of the GPL and the desire to add a plugin infrastructure to GCC, the FSF has now announced that the licensing of the GCC runtime code has changed. The FSF wishes to modernize this bit of licensing code while, simultaneously, using it as a defense against the distribution of proprietary GCC plugins.

Section 7 of GPLv3 explicitly allows copyright holders to exempt recipients of the software from specific terms of the license. Interestingly, people who redistribute the software have the option of removing those added permissions. The new GCC runtime library license is GPLv3, but with an additional permission as described in Section 7. That permission reads:

Anybody who distributes a program which uses the GCC runtime, and which is not licensed under GPLv3, will depend on this exemption, so it is good to understand what it says. In short, it allows the runtime to be combined with code under any license as long as that code has been built with an "Eligible Compilation Process."

The license defines a "Compilation Process" as the series of steps which transforms high-level code into target code. It does not include anything which happens before the high-level code hits the compiler. So preprocessors and code generation systems are explicitly not a part of the compilation process. As for what makes an "Eligible Compilation Process," the license reads:

This is where the license bites users of proprietary GCC plugins. Since those plugins are not GPL-compatible, they render the compilation process "ineligible" and the resulting code cannot be distributed in combination with the GCC runtime libraries. This approach has some interesting implications:

• "GPL-compatible" is defined as allowing combination with GCC. So a compilation process which employs a GPLv2-licensed module loses eligibility.

• This must be the first free software license which discriminates on the basis of how other code was processed. Combining with proprietary code is just fine, but combining with free software that happens to have been run through a proprietary optimizing module is not allowed. It is an interesting extension of free software licensing conditions that could well prove to have unexpected results.

• While the use of a proprietary GCC module removes the license exemption, using a 100% proprietary compiler does not. As long as the compiler is not derived from GCC somehow, linking to the GCC runtime library is allowed.

The explanatory material released with the license change includes this text:

With this change, though, the FSF is doing exactly that: using its "small libraries" to control how the to-be-developed GCC plugin mechanism will be used. It will be interesting to see how well this works; if a vendor is truly determined to become a purveyor of proprietary GCC modules, the implementation of some replacement "small libraries" might not appear to be much of an obstacle. In that sense, this licensing truly could backfire: it could result in the distribution of binaries built with both proprietary GCC modules and a proprietary runtime library.

But, then, that depends on the existence of vendors wanting to distribute proprietary compiler plugins in the first place. It is not entirely clear that such vendors exist at this point. So it may well end up that the runtime exemption will not bring about any changes noticeable by users or developers, most of whom never thought about the runtime exemption in its previous form either.

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KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Buried deep inside a recent interview with Linus Torvalds was the revelation that he had moved away from KDE and back to GNOME—which he famously abandoned in 2005. The cause of that switch was the problems he had with KDE 4.0, which seems to be a popular reaction to that release. Various media outlets, Slashdot in particular, elevated Torvalds's switch to the headline of the interview. That led, of course, to some loud complaints from the KDE community, but also a much more thoughtful response from KDE project lead Aaron Seigo. While it is somewhat interesting to know Torvalds's choice for his desktop, there are other, more important issues that stem from the controversy.

Never one to mince words, Torvalds is clear in his unhappiness: "I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster, I switched to GNOME." But, he does go on to acknowledge that he understands, perhaps even partially agrees with, the reasons behind it:

There has been a regular stream of reports of unhappy KDE users, with many folks switching to GNOME due to KDE 4.0 not living up to their expectations—or even being usable at all. Part of the problem stems from Fedora's decision to move to KDE 4 in Fedora 9, but not give users a way to fall back to KDE 3.5. When Torvalds upgraded to Fedora 9, he got a desktop that "was not as functional", leading him to go back to GNOME—though, he hates "the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do", which was one of the reasons he moved to KDE in the first place.

One facet of the problem, as Seigo points out, is the race between distributions to incorporate the most leading—perhaps bleeding—edge software versions. It is clear that KDE did not do enough to communicate what it thought 4.0 was: "KDE 4.0.0 is our 'will eat your children' release of KDE4, not the next release of KDE 3.5" is how Seigo described it when it was released. That message, along with the idea that KDE 4 would not be ready to replace 3.5 until 4.1 was released, didn't really propagate though. It was hard for users, distributions, and the press to separate the KDE vision of the future from the actual reality of what was delivered.

There clearly were users, perhaps less vocal or with fewer requirements, who stuck with KDE through the transition. The author notes that he went through the same upgrade path in Fedora without suffering any major problems. Reduced functionality and some annoyances were certainly present, but it was not enough to cause a switch to a different desktop environment. It is impossible to get any real numbers for users who switched, had a distribution that allowed them to stick with 3.5, or just muddled through until KDE 4 became more usable. But, without a doubt, the handling of the KDE 4.0 release gave the project a rather nasty black eye.

Seigo also minces few words when pointing to the distributions to take a large part of that blame:

There is no real substitute to distributions and projects like KDE working together to determine what should be packaged up in the next distribution release. It is unclear where exactly that process broke down for Fedora 9, but it certainly led to much of the outcry about KDE 4. But, if they had it to do all over again, how would KDE have handled things differently? Projects want to make their latest releases available to users, so that testing, bug reporting, and fixing can happen. That is the service that distributions provide. But users rightly expect a certain base level of functionality in the tools that get released.

To some extent, it is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. In his defense of the 4.0 release process, Seigo notes that releases, as opposed to alphas or betas, are the only way to get attention from users and testers:

It would be easy to just fault KDE for releasing too early, but Seigo does have a point about "participation". Likely due to their exuberance at what they had accomplished for KDE 4, the developers were blinded to the inadequacies of the release for day-to-day use—at least for some users. The project needed to clearly get the message out that it might not be usable by all and it failed to do that. It's a fine line, but for something as integral as a desktop environment, it would have been better to find a way to release with more things working. The flip side, of course, is that it takes testing to figure out what isn't working—which is part of the service users provide back to the projects.

This is not the first time we have seen this kind of thing. Red Hat, and now Fedora, have always been rather—some would say overly—aggressive about including new software into releases. Some readers will likely remember the problems with the switch to glibc-2.0 in Red Hat 5. Others may fondly recall Red Hat 7, which shipped an unreleased GCC that didn't build the kernel correctly.

We may be seeing something similar play out with the recently announced plans to include btrfs in Fedora 11. While it has been merged into the mainline kernel for 2.6.29 (due in March), it is most definitely not in its final form. There are likely to be stability issues as well as possible changes to the user-space API. There is even the possibility of an on-disk format change, though Chris Mason and the btrfs developers are hoping to avoid it.

Much like with KDE 4, btrfs will likely benefit from more users, but there is the risk that some will either miss or ignore the warnings and lose critical data in a btrfs volume. Should that turn out to be some high-profile developer who declares the filesystem to be a "disaster", it could be a setback to the adoption of btrfs.

KDE 4.2 has just been released, and early reports would indicate that it is very functional. With the problems from the KDE 4.0 release—now a year old—fading in the memory of many, a rekindling of those flames is probably less than completely welcomed by the project. But the lessons they learned, even if solutions are not obvious, are important for KDE as well as other projects. Because free software is developed and released in the open, much can be learned from other projects' mistakes. It is yet another benefit that openness provides.

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