Kernel: Greg Kroah-Hartman Interview and New LWN Articles
-
FLOSS Weekly 706: Secrets of the Linux Kernel - Greg Kroah-Hartman and Linux Kernel Development
If you care about Linux and what goes into maintaining the kernel, you know how important Greg Kroah-Hartman is to stable releases and much more. On this can't-miss episode of FLOSS Weekly, Kroah-Hartman gives deep, knowing, and good-humored answers to questions from Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Jonathan Bennett.
-
Still waiting for stackable security modules [LWN.net]
The Linux security module (LSM) mechanism was created as a result of the first Kernel Summit in 2001; it was designed to allow the development of multiple approaches to Linux security. That goal has been met; there are several security modules available with current kernels. The LSM subsystem was not designed, though, to allow multiple security modules to work together on the same system. Developers have been working to rectify that problem almost since the LSM subsystem was merged, but with limited success; some small security modules can be stacked on top of the "major" ones, but arbitrary stacking is not possible. Now, a full 20 years after security-module support went into the 2.5 development kernel series, it looks like a solution to the stacking problem may finally be getting closer.
-
Copyright notices (or the lack thereof) in kernel code [LWN.net]
The practice of requiring copyright assignments for contributions to free-software projects has been in decline for years; the GNU Binutils project may be the latest domino to fall in that regard. The Linux kernel project, unlike some others, has always allowed contributors to retain their copyrights, resulting in a code base that has widely distributed ownership. In such a project, who owns the copyright to a given piece of code is not always obvious. Some developers (or their employers) are insistent about the placement of copyright notices in the code to document their ownership of parts of the kernel. A series of recent discussions within the Btrfs subsystem, though, has made it clear that there is no project-wide policy on when these notices are warranted — or even acceptable.
In early September, a patch series implementing fscrypt integration for the Btrfs filesystem included this patch adding, among other things, a one-line Facebook copyright notice.
-
Moving past TCP in the data center, part1 [LWN.net]
At the recently concluded Netdev 0x16 conference, which was held both in Lisbon, Portugal and virtually, Stanford professor John Ousterhout gave his personal views on where networking in data centers needs to be headed. To solve the problems that he sees, he suggested some "fairly significant changes" to those environments, including leaving behind the venerable—ubiquitous—TCP transport protocol. While LWN was unable to attend the conference itself, due to scheduling and time-zone conflicts, we were able to view the video of Ousterhout's keynote talk to bring you this report.