Date:	Thu, 05 Mar 1998 10:55:16 -0800
From:	Jonathan Jefferies <jonathanj@allant.com>
To:	Linux Newbie Mailing List <linux-newbie@vger.rutgers.edu>
Subject: (OFF SUBJECT)Brief Report on Linus Torvalds' talk

Just thought that some of the newbie list might
like to hear a bit about Linus Torvalds' talk
last night.  It was the 10'th anniversary of
the SVLUG (Silicon Valley Linux Users Group).
Course that's a couple of years older than Linux
itself and I didn't catch the whole explanation.
The talk was given at a room at Cisco Systems.
First impressions were that Cisco must be doing
really well.  Very attractive campus with the
talk being given in building J.  Don't know if
J is the last building on the list or not.
2nd suprise was that the room was advertised
as holding 350.  Well there were something
like 250 chairs and they were all taken when
I got there and I did a quick head count and
came up with 200+ standing or squating on the
floor down in front.  The organizers repeated
themselves several times that this was the
largest group they had ever had.  And Linus 
commented that he had anticipated something more
like the 25 folks he was used to seeing meeting
at a local burger place.  There were a couple of
organizational things dealt with including pointing
out the SVLUG's website( www.svlug.org)and mail list 
so newcomers could get more info on the group and 
then the floor was turned over to Linus.  Also 
identified at least 4 head hunters in the audience
who were looking at the gathered talent with rather
hungry looks, given the current shortages of trained
engineers in SV I can guess that they were hard put
not to salivate publically.  :)

Linus began by observing that he hated podiums
and microphones but that just this once...  He then
pointed out that although he is given credit for Linux,
he personally has written only maybe 50,000 lines of
the 1,000,000+ lines of code that comprise Linux.  But
he stoutly maintained that it is the most interesting
50,000 lines of code.  He also indicated his gratitude
to all those other developers who have made Linux actually
work.  He then launched into his talk which was primarily
dealing with the heart of the kernel and specifically
smp, I believe this refers to "symmetric multiple processors",
and the many problems involved.  His talk was straight
forward enough that I was able to follow most of it and
this is an area that I have not delved into before.  Sort
of like how the olympic althletes make it look so easy
that everyone thinks, "why I could do that".  I won't
bore you with the technical details which got down into
the granularity of memory areas that are needed to be locked
when you have multiple threads running on multiple processors.
The problem that he is attempting to solve is that the 
Linux kernel doesn't scale well as he desires when used 
in systems having  2 or more processors. Typical of the 
situation when  Linux is applied to heavy duty work as 
a server.  At present this is work is (I got this only 
as an aside) primarily being carried on by himself and 
one fellow in Hungary.  This is also the reason for the 
long, 1.6 year, interval between the release of the 2.0 
kernel and the 2.2 (2.1 is the work in progress and the most
recent kernel that we are using is 2.0.33, the 33 release
of 2.0 is the way I read it).

The evening ended a the presentation of palm top computer
from 3COM ( I think it was) who say that they are
currently porting Linux to their palm top computer,
and this was an initial version.  That was followed by
a raffle presented by the SVLUG with the prizes being
of a bunch of Linux CDs, mostly red hat, as well as some 
T-shirts from redhat.  Apparently Linus uses the RedHat
version himself.

All in all it was an interesting evening.  The talk was
interesting but the thing that impressed me most was
the audience.  Maybe 20% were grey beards like myself.
But the large majority were under 35 and this appeared
to be a very talented bunch.

It is good to know that Linux continues to be
under very active developement.  Linus himself apparently
is paid to work primarily on Linux by a company which
uses it but does not sell it.  And he makes a point of
not being ruled by financial/commercial ends.

Your enquiring but never retiring reporter
Jonathan Jefferies