Quotes of the week

[Posted October 5, 2011 by corbet]

Some day someone will write something that supercedes the Linux kernel. Probably before that someone should either fix or replace C so that it has an inbuilt ability to describe locking and statically enforce some of the locking rules at compile time. I'm sure my generation of programmers will despise the resulting language but in time we will all thank whoever does it.

-- Alan Cox

Inside of Oracle, we've decided to make btrfs the default filesystem for Oracle Linux. This is going into beta now and we'll increase our usage of btrfs in production over the next four to six months... What this means is that absolutely cannot move forward without btrfsck. RH, Fujitsu, SUSE and others have spent a huge amount of time on the filesystem and it is clearly time to start putting it into customer hands.

-- Chris Mason

Note that if your laptop allows incoming ssh connections, and you logged into master.kernel.org with ssh forwarding enabled, your laptop may not be safe. So be very, very careful before you assume that your laptop is safe. At least one kernel developer, after he got past the belief, "surely I could have never had my machine be compromised", looked carefully and found rootkits on his machines.

-- Ted Ts'o

The more important point is that as far as the linux-kernel community is concerned, the guy we've all seen show up at conferences and present stuff all these times *is* Andrew Morton, even if his real name is George Q. Smith and he's been on the run for the last 27 years for an embarrassing incident involving an ostrich, the mayor's daughter, and 17 gallons of mineral oil in the atrium of the museum.

-- Valdis Kletnieks

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 6, 2011 20:08 UTC (Thu) by Slumberthud (subscriber, #45657) [Link] (3 responses)

The link to the Alan Cox quote takes me to the Google+ login page.

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 6, 2011 20:58 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link] (2 responses)

> The link to the Alan Cox quote takes me to the Google+ login page.

Most strange. I can sort of reproduce that using Konqueror, but Google seemed to have me "half logged-in" ... the login page for G+ had the username filled out (for an account i use rarely and doesn't have a G+ account), but was still prompting for a password. Does any of that ring a bell with what you saw?

jake

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 6, 2011 21:12 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (1 responses)

That's what I get also. A Google+ login page with my gmail account name filled in. But I have never enabled Google+ for my gmail account.

Quotes of the week

Posted Oct 6, 2011 21:18 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

> A Google+ login page with my gmail account name filled in.

Annoying, but it would seem that doing the "sign out and sign in as another user" (or something like that), "fixes" the problem (in that you can see Alan's message after that) ...

seems like Google is just assuming that all Google account holders have G+ accounts too ... or something ...

rude, and annoying, but the jury's still out on "evil" :)

jake

Enforcing locking rules at compile-time

Posted Oct 7, 2011 20:12 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

There actually is a language that may be able to enforce the locking rules Alan is talking about. Its name is ATS:
http://www.ats-lang.org/
It features linear types, which are able to enforce many API usage rules.
The following paper may be of special interest to Linux kernel developers:
http://www.ats-lang.org/PAPER/LDD-plpv07.pdf

Enforcing locking rules at compile-time

Posted Oct 13, 2011 22:08 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

So what we need is a hybrid of Occam-Pi (which handles all the other things Alan was concerned with in his post) and ATS. The Linux kernel is largely modular, so provided the module framework is correct there is very little that can truly be superseded - it can only ever be upgraded.

Once we've this hybrid language, all that's left is obtaining the necessary 800,000 man-hours of work it'll take to convert the kernel - function by function - and audit it.