Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft employs primary maintainers of the Linux kernel (gregkh) and systemd (Lennart Poettering), among other Linux contributors.

(correction: gregkh works for Linux Foundation, Sasha Levin works for MS).

Azure Sphere OS for embedded is based on the Linux kernel, https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/ossna19/91/Crossover_E...

There's also their NOS for merchant silicon whitebox networking, https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/software...

> SONiC is an open source network operating system (NOS) based on Linux that runs on over 100 different switches from multiple vendors and ASICs.. members including Alibaba, Broadcom, Dell, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA.. Microsoft founded SONiC.. as open source so the entire networking ecosystem would grow stronger. SONiC already runs on millions of ports in the networks of cloud scalers, enterprises, and fintechs.

View on HN

10+ years ago, a MS dev inserted a hex constant B16B00B5 into the linux kernel and caused a fight.

True story: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/b16b00b5/amp

They could have changed the number to decimal problem solved.

It looks like Sasha Levin works for Google as of 2021. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-levin-9861662

Do you have a source on Microsoft employing GKH? First time I've heard of it.

Apologies, I mixed up gregkh (Linux Foundation) with Sasha Levin (Microsoft), https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/06/26/2

DirectX on Linux, https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/19/742

Sasha Levin works at Google https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-levin-9861662

Since 2021. During the 2020 thread posted above, he worked at Microsoft.

Other MS contributors to LKML: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=microsoft.com

>systemd (Lennart Poettering)

I see they are still going strong on the embrace, extend extinguish strategy.

To be fair, systemd started when Poettering was at Red Hat. He was EEEing Linux even before he was at Microsoft :^)

Redhats whole business model was to make linux too complex to understand by anyone not at redhat.

Is systemd bad?

It felt it was being forced on me when various distributions switched to it. And it was something new and buggy to learn that I didn't wanted to deal with.

The general idea behind it are good in my opinion. But the problem is how confusing and slow the god damn thing is.

Try overriding a service definition? You must know to set exec to empty string before you are allowed to override it. Really first line sets to "" second to the value you want. Just weird.

Try getting the logs of the service you just edited and restarted? Wait 10s on a flagship computer for the 5 lines of log to show up.

Systemd stores logs in binary. That takes more storage space than gzipped text. While being about 100x or more slower than zcat and co.

interesting thanks, seems more user friendly largely than init.d though, maybe I'm just a Linux noob.

It's very sad how linux ended up being eaten alive, rotten deep inside

Devuan [1] or freebsd it is for me until an alternative emerges

[1] - https://www.devuan.org/

How is Linux "rotten"?

It's not, I think the OP was just trying to plug alternatives in a toxic way.

It's full of corporates with self-interests

system-d being spread everywhere is a side-effect of that

Linux was always being developed with companies, and with their self interests. It's the same with BSDs too.

Yes, we also add what we like and what we want to see, but companies employ these developers to implement what they need inside Linux.

We have kernel-bypass-networking because of Cloudflare. BSD has extremely fast networking because Netflix and other companies needed it, Linux has better power management because server needed it, etc., etc.

I also have points which I don't like with systemd, but companies are neither new, nor they're gonna leave Linux alone (and, they shouldn't).

Are you saying that Debian is corporate and therefore Linux is rotten?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com