Linux Kernel 6.0
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I hadn't realized that before. The link below discusses the reasons why this was done.
https://www.linux.com/news/linux-mark-institute-protecting-l...
Not to say it's impossible, it's just a lot harder.
In contrast, transferring the trademark to a committee-run foundation (or to go into economy analogy again, a company that's traded on the stock market), the incentives for those in control can drift: short-term profit wins over long-term interests (e.g. trust of the public). We've seen way too many organizations in the FOSS world fall victim to that, most notably Mozilla and MySQL - the former is always embroiled into some sort of scandal and Firefox usage has fallen through the floor, the latter was mismanaged by Sun and eventually Oracle so hard that its co-founder was forced to fork off the codebase.
* EDIT: In the sense of being non disruptive and safe; the features are very non-boring:)
If there is one thing I've learned from reading various messages from Linus on the mailing lists, is that WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!
So Linux would be perpetually on the same major version, which means there is little reason to use Semver in this case.
Also, the first number gets updated whenever Linus feels like the second number gets too large, not sure how "2.1028.0" would solve that :)
Yes:)
> which means there is little reason to use Semver in this case.
Okay, that's fair. If semver is there to signal breaking changes and there will never be breaking changes maybe it's not super useful.
> Also, the first number gets updated whenever Linus feels like the second number gets too large, not sure how "2.1028.0" would solve that :)
That's not "also"; I'm specifically saying that Torvald's versioning system is bad. Honestly I'd be happier with losing the leading number completely and doing an increment per feature release; right now the "major" version field just doesn't mean anything.
Not that most users care, as most of the tens of thousands of devices supported are fairly obscure and the changes don't affect the other users… yet kernel API changes that break, say, Nvidia's drivers or ZFS or other high-profile out of tree drivers, have an outsized effect. You either have to increase the semver major version with every single release, or somehow version internal APIs separately, which isn't really practical either.
Now, if Google would also enforce open-source compliance... the amount of hoops one has to jump through to get OSS dumps is absurd, and most of these lack critical parts (e.g. build toolchain, kernel config, partition layouts, DTBs) so it's OSS in theory but unusable to develop alternative OSes in practice.
The problem i see is, what's next? Google chrome is at 106... a few more years, and 200.. 300? What happens if linus runs out of fingers for the major number too?
I miss the "good old times", where 2.4.17->2.4.17.1 meant a minor patch, ->2.4.18 meant a new version with some new features, -> 2.6.x meant some large changes, and 3.x meant something huge, with possible backwards incompatibilities and making you choose, between a mature 2.x version vs a newish 3.x version.
One name for the marketing brochures, one for techies (and their scripts). Works for me.
This massively predates web browsers with 100 versions
Also in 2011 firefox went from "slow versioning" (up to version 4) to a new major version number every few months... the unofficial reason was, that chrome was "overtaking" firefox in version numbers, and "higher number == better browser" (chrome went from 9 to 16 that year).
EDIT: Ah I got the joke - he meant DIGITS!
Here's an article for reference (2015): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/linux...
Linux 6.0 could have been versioned as 5.20 but Linus chose 6.0 out of thin air. Nothing more nothing less.
Linus made an off by one error :)
While the sociologists are off figuring out why this gave us a base ten number system instead of base eleven, the computer scientists are showing off how they can count to a thousand instead.
(And also get thrown out of every bar where they order four of something.)
A base-12 number system would be advantageous because 12 is a "superior highly composite number". However, needless to say, despite the number theoretical advantages changing from our current base-10 system is essentially impossible.
Regardless of its origin, base 12 is still a major part of our lives (24 hours to a day, 60 minutes to an hour, even 60 minutes to a grade in angles).
Here is a quick overview: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel/Migrate_2.4_to_2.6
6.5, 6.6, 6.7 will be major versions of the kernel. All of them will receive patch releases (6.5.1, 6.6.6, 6.7.2, etc); one of them may become LTS, they may not. Whether gkh decides to skip 6.6.6 and go to 6.6.7 instead, that's up to him, but it'd probably cause more issues with scripts than it'd be worth it. I get that people can be superstitious, but imo it's not worth it.
[1]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/...
… kidding
According to semver there should be some heavy incompatible changes in this release, while it’s only a regular update.
Maybe we should all just agree that semver is simply a pipe dream and we are never sure that lib update won’t break our app. Or that lib maintainers take compatibility really serious and they don’t break it, like kernel hackers do.
If it helps, I remember the transition from Linux 0.99 to 1.0, the switch to ELF and Glibc, the first non-x86 architecture support, the introduction of kernel modules, threads being a new feature, and the dropping of 386 support - all but the last happened while I was using Linux as my desktop OS at my day job :-)
I would nearly bet that there are still vendors shipping 2.6.x kernels in their embedded systems today. Probably rare...
There's a surprising amount of userspace code which has to check the kernel version number because some behaviour has no "feature check" that can be used. On rare occasions that gets tricky when a distro has backported some kernel change to an old kernel version.
Because it's not supposed to be done, most breaking changes are unexpected so it wouldn't be possible to implement semver anyway, or are bug fixes which happen far too often for semver.
That is extremely unlikely to catch on. It's both annoying and imposes significant costs. It also tends to trap you in early design decisions. (Don't get me wrong, in my dream world where all software was formally designed and written perfectly the first time and orgs gave infinite resources to engineering and addressing tech debt, everyone would use semver and almost nobody would ever pass 1.x - it's just that I don't think it's likely)
Semver is good for things like libraries that have a single audience. Either the workflow is broken for all of them or none of them (at least mostly). It can also be used for individual APIs. But for systems that are a collection of multiple APIs (kernel, browser, apps, etc), semver starts making much less sense.
Well done to the team.
What amazes me is that they (and a number of other projects) do it without any traditional “management.” Sure, there might be a release manager, but it’s more like a coordinator/comptroller function. It’s just a bunch of (mostly)”let’s act like adults” sort of people, and without all of the bureaucracy that usually accompanies some of even the smallest software efforts, it just keeps going.
I'm inclined to think that it's partly because they're not chasing growth metrics, have to report to stakeholders, etc. Most companies drown in the overhead related to such processes.
The recent funeral of Queen Elizabeth II was an opportunity to read up on the many trivias of British royalty. (PS: the British royalty is definitely not the head of my country).
One thing that struck me was that thay still have plenty of things (actual physical objects) from the middle ages that has survived to the modern day.
I think it's awesome that something from the middle ages has been immaculately maintained to the modern day.
So perhaps, by the time it's the year 7298 Linux kernel would still be in use, immaculately maintained over thousands of years. Wouldn't that just be great?
(I wonder how intergalactic pull requests are gonna work out...)
(for context, read A Deepness in the Sky - but it's better to begin with A Fire Upon the Deep)
Either life is virtually non-existent thus far, virtually always suicidal, or discovering it is tremendously unlikely.
Neither of the last two bode well for us. It seems to me most likely that ftl suggestions an empty universe or one in which we too are likely to die without learning it.
What’s wrong with a species of sentient house cats that just want to nap all day?
Nothing wrong with that, but if life is common, you’d need all life to be like that to explain the Fermi paradox, which seems unlikely.
We aren't far from such technology already. For instance imagine just a few generations of biotech and computational technology - it may already be enough for us to transform and evolve into some biomechanical hive that bears little resemblance to our current selves.
It could also be that once you are advanced enough, you transcend this physical universe. For example, the entire universe to a deep sea squid is cold dark water without much other life. They have no way to comprehend that there is so much more to reality. They just aren't capable of it. We are not special and also likely not able to detect or comprehend other levels of reality that would be more vast and interesting to advanced beings than simple FTL leaps around the galaxy. Perhaps they just aren't interested in our little ant hill the milky way.
The lack of imagination around what is possible and the supposed paradox posited by Fermi is disheartening.
I think similar reasoning could apply though. If advanced civilizations escape into a different dimension or state of being where they are undetectable, we’d need all of them to do that to explain the Fermi paradox.
I think there is a reason to believe that this represents a unique threshold rather than one of many and that even highly advanced beings would be fundamentally comprehensible and describable even if their technology is not in a way that probably isn't true of the squid because our abstract reasoning can represent the basic facts needed to describe what they are doing even if it misses the why or how.
Even a biomechanical hive would have greater longevity and resources by expanding even if we don't much recognize what they are doing with said resources.
Or they tend to sublime [0], or advanced societies prefer to live in virtual reality, or they tend towards being enlightened enough not to mess with species in an earlier stage of development, or they're not very interested in us, or we've been unlucky/lucky to have avoided discovery so far, or FTL is possible but can only be exceeded slightly, or FTL is possible but requires billions of years of technological development to achieve, or FTL requires a prohibitive amount of energy to travel at longer distances, etc., etc.
Everything we've built so far, obeyed physics, and I expect that to remain true in perpetuity.
You can always argue that we know more now, that there are fundamental limits, etc., but there’s always more to learn and revise.
Instead, many things that seemed possible 50-150 years ago have turned out in the meantime to be impossible - speeds faster than c (before Maxwell's equations and SR), arbitrary precision measurements (before Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), uniquely determining the future state of a system based on a previous state (before wave functions), arbitrary amounts of matter and energy (before quantization of these and other properties) etc.
The history of physics is usually one of discovering new constraints, not one of discovering new possibilities. Before physics, we used to believe in unconstrained magic. Not only have we always believed we can reach the stars, we used to believe we could do it by finding the right magical formula or praying hard enough.
Of course there are some exceptions - electricity and quantum computing come to mind.
5000 years is before Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
It's like complaining on why people don't try to build a perpetual machine - it's because it is not possible. You're welcome to keep trying though.
There's now a scheme that doesn't require negative energy.
https://newatlas.com/physics/ftl-warp-drive-no-negative-ener...
It may be almost impossible to build due to the energy required, but it isn't prohibited by the physics we currently know.
Stating that our current models of physics preclude X neglects to mention it's our current understanding of physics which preclude X.
Our models may change to better match reality in the future.
Is a statement that nothing can go faster than the speed of light not a model? And if not, how did we arrive at that knowledge? God? Direct experience of the speed of light?
At least until we solve general relativity vs quantum mechanics (theory of everything), I would be hesitant to claim we know enough to state definitely what is or isn't possible.
We also know this very clearly from relatively simple direct measurements: there never was and there never will be a way for matter to accelerate to speeds greater than c.
The likelihood of your statement is similar to that of mine. It's just nicer to conjecture about the former because the increased complexity brings the illusion of potential.
Even Newtonian physics 300 years ago largely remain the same, relativity complemented it and explained issues on edge cases. It did not completely overturn Newtonian Physics and gravity did not became repulsive instead of attractive.
The discovery of more fundamental models may reveal dualities between our existing theories and new ones.
These duals may show that our current models are accurate, but only to an extent, or don't apply in certain circumstances.
It's hard to fathom, but with gaps to fill in our knowledge of the universe, we may let our imaginations run wild yet :').
This is such a glaring and huge blindspot in western scientific thought process - a blindness to the human element of the scientific process. As if "physics" is something that has been around forever and we just found it in perfect form like some ancient artifact in a cave, rather than the truth of the matter, which is that it is a human creation that is modified with time and is a complex communal phenomenon with many different facets and pieces that not everyone agrees upon. In fact many of the most fundamental elements of physics are under revision and without consensus.
(Sorry, I finished the third book of the Three Body Problem series literally an hour ago, and, well, curvature propulsion [1])
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/6lj9df/ca...
Apparently exotic objects like wormholes may exist which can "teleport" one from one part of the universe to another while never violating the faster than light principle.
[See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole ]
In other words, we could have intergalactic messages.
Our understanding of Physics is still evolving and things considered impossible today may become possible tomorrow without necessarily bringing the whole edifice of Physics down by taking paths that are not known so far.
Grand as the achievements of modern Physics, we should still remain humble about what is possible and impossible.
also gravity is very weak and need a significant amount of mass/energy to source it, a black hole of the mass of the earth is a centimeter in diameter.
and yes smaller black holes are in theory possible to make (in some theories at least) but they tend to evaporate very very quickly by hawking radiation (and none was observed at cern).
then there's the ER=EPR conjecture that quantum entanglement is due to microscopic wormholes connecting the states but again doesn't seem you can shove a photon in there and get super luminal communication as quantum entanglement cannot transfer information faster than light.
in the end Lorentz invariance and thus the speed of light is deeply embedded in the fabric of spacetime (we never seen any violations, and i saw the super luminal neutrino drama first hand as i was doing my phd in Bern)
they are a bit like warp drives, possible in some theory, wildly impractical, certainly lethal and requires infinite energy and/or destroys the arrival galaxy.
more realistically speaking, and i know ppl will hate me for this: we have a decline in biodiversity probably unprecedented since the dinosaurs went exciting, a near vertical climate trip to tackle (not making the first even worst), limited ressources to that mitigate it but more importantly: very few people paying attention.
at this rate(s) i doubt the successor to the Large Hadron Collider will be ready before collapse of our civilization.
i get it's nice to dream but we are tripping all regulation mechanisms on this planet and that's not something that's good for survival, fossil records show.
maybe im wrong, im a physicist after all, and SuperElon FromTheFuture will ride a closed timelike curve and come Save Us All (TM) with electric rockets and SmartTechnology (C).
(edit: added a pinch of dark humor.)
Without violating the speed of light limit, intergalactic messages are highly improbable but not impossible. The science could conceivable allow it but no practical path has been found yet.
Give it 100-200 years. If civilisation does not collapse before that, we might be able to revise our answer. It took decades of experimental research before gravity wave detection become possible. Who knows what 100-200 years of research might uncover?
Would you agree?
it's a matter of priority i guess
We might have strong AI by then, and surely one of its first tasks (assuming it doesn't wipe out humanity) would be to redesign our entire information technology stack from the ground up, which would make any software built by humans instantly obsolete.
But even if that somehow doesn't happen, I fully expect an operating system to emerge in the next few decades that is built around a formally verifiable safety and security model. Once it is production ready, it will dominate the market soon afterwards. The stakes associated with information technology are ever-increasing, and relying on a system written in a language where "off by one" can mean "privilege escalation" isn't sustainable in the long term.
Maybe strong AI can help in this regard. Or maybe it will just emulate the prejudices of its creators.
Either way, I don't understand how these two issues are related.
Considering how many untold millions of devices run Linux worldwide – servers for myriad business applications, consumer electronics, motor vehicles, industrial machinery, medical devices, lab equipment, aircraft, spacecraft, satellites – if z/OS can make it to 75, why not Linux? Linux will turn 75 in 2066, and then it only need survive another 6 years to make it to 2072.
Even if some new hotness (such as Google's Fuchsia) overtakes it, its existing momentum will be enough sustain it for decades to come – and people will be willing to pay for necessary maintenance (bug fixes, support for new hardware, network protocol enhancements, etc), just like they do with countless other legacy systems today.
> I fully expect an operating system to emerge in the next few decades that is built around a formally verifiable safety and security model
We already have formally verified operating systems – the open source seL4 microkernel was proven correct in 2009. But, few have adopted it – because, whatever the theoretical advantages a formally-verified microkernel may have, they don't amount to enough in practice to justify the switching costs.
IBM has now added to z/OS the ability to run z/Linux Docker containers (a feature they call "zCX"), which run in a hypervisor built in to the OS. It is a lot easier to just run the software under Linux, which is all ASCII/UTF-8 and has pretty up-to-date APIs (even though few Linux distributions have formal UNIX certification, Linux generally implements all the standard UNIX APIs, except for obscure things with dubious value and little use). When it is just VMs on the same machine, network communication between two operating systems can be very fast.
But none of them are adequate replacements for today's mainstream operating systems. seL4 is a research project, not a Linux competitor. If it offered features similar to Linux, companies absolutely would switch – the cost of security vulnerabilities and their management is staggering.
I doubt this. Linux is going to be around for a while just like COBOL, mainframes, and a bunch of other legacy technology.
Even today there’s not really a clear Linux competitor. It has been dominant for quite a while.
I grew up near a church built in the 11th century, for example. The interior is newer but the building itself is original.
My own family inherited things from cca 16th-17th century (useless junk but anyways).
That's terrific!
Facepalm.
My country got plundered, conquered, and colonized; they took away everything they could possibly take away. Some of those objects are in some European museums and palaces ;)
(Don't take this the wrong way. I'm not blaming anybody. What has happened has happened.)
In the far future, humanity has ships which are mostly automated and don't need actual pilots. However they need tech guys to constantly fix and patch the software. They have to know a lot of the history of the software to be good at their job. The hero is basically the last member of humanity who knows what the unix epoch means.
I love it when Very Serious People say "X is impossible". You then show them an example of "X", and these Very Serious People hem, and haw, or rage-quit meetings, or do whatever it takes to avoid admitting that they were wrong.