Monday night in Dublin

So, I'm 'home alone' - my wife and kids are all down in Dungarvan for the summer and I'm left at home on my tod.

Last night I jumped on the DART, headed into town and attended the Irish Linux Users Group meeting in the HEAnet offices in the IFSC.

Last night's talk was from Stephen Hemminger - who I gather is "Mr Networking" as far as the Linux kernel is concerned.

Stephen explained his role within the Linux community and his mission in life (which is to have Linux work for people).  He then went on to explain how the Linux kernel is developed and what it's made up of (something that amazed me was that around 50% of it is all device drivers).  A new kernel is released every 2 to 3 months (the stable kernel is always the last one: n-1).  As things get fixed they end up in the new kernel and occasionally there is a service pack release that adds fixes and/or new functionality to a stable release.

He spoke about some of the new and interesting stuff he's working on right now (DCCP, Virtualisation, Wireless, Infiniband/RDMA and some Timer cleanups) and also about some of the really hard stuff (problems to solve), like Out of memory handling, Suspend and Resume, Failure handling (crash dumps and the likes) and vendor awareness.

The comment that I really liked (and had to discuss with him after his talk) was the fact that he wished Linux had a Blue Screen (of death)!  You can get memory dumps and a lot of diagnostics out of a system, but the single (blue) screen full of information that you get when a Windows system panic traps is so useful.

Stephen obviously really enjoys his work - he has a lot of passion for Linux and loves the ability to get inside it, fix things and solve problems.

After the talk, we all retired into a local pub for a few beers.  What I didn't get (and was expecting, to be honest) was the slagging - for being a Microsoft employee at a Linux event!

I really enjoyed last night - it's always interesting to hear other opinions and views on things (and I love learning new stuff).

Dave.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I guess he could have meant that "we" were working on DCCP (as in it is being worked on).  I'll see if I can find either the slides of a recording of the session - and will send you a link to them.. Dave.

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2007
  Dave Miller is actually Mr Networking but Stephen is a key lieutenant. I didn't realise he was working on DCCP - I'm one of the core developers of that and saw no activity from him...