Linus Torvalds: Linux Is Much Bigger Than Me!

Linus Torvalds: "Linux Is Much Bigger Than Me!"

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Q: Recently, you seemed to slam Subversion and CVS, questioning their basic architecture. Now that you've got responses from the Subversion community, do you stand corrected, or are you still unconvinced?

Linus: I like making strong statements, because I find the discussion interesting. In other words, I actually tend to 'like' arguing. Not mindlessly, but I certainly tend to prefer the discussion a bit more heated, and not just entirely platonic.

And making strong arguments occasionally ends up resulting in a very valid rebuttal, and then I'll happily say: "Oh, ok, you're right."

But no, that didn't happen on SVN/CVS. I suspect a lot of people really don't much like CVS, so I didn't really even expect anybody to argue that CVS was really anything but a legacy system. And while I've gotten a few people who argued that I shouldn't have been quite so impolite against SVN (and hey, that's fair -- I'm really not a very polite person!), I don't think anybody actually argued that SVN was 'good'.

SVN is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it. But very few people are 'proud' of it, or excited about it.

Git, on the other hand, has some of the 'UNIX philosophy' behind it. Not that it is about UNIX, per se, but like original UNIX, it had a fundamental idea behind it. For UNIX, the underlying philosophy was/is that, "Everything is a file." For git, it's, â€œEverything is just an object in the content-addressable database."

Q: Did they ever experiment with alternate instruction set implementations at Transmeta? [Transmeta Crusoe chip seemed like a very soft CPU -- reminding one of Burroughs B1000 interpretive machine, which actually implemented multiple virtual machines. There was one for system software, another for Cobol, another for Fortranâ€¦ If that is correct, then one could implement Burroughs 6/7000 or HP3000 like stack architecture on the chip or an instruction set suitable for JVM, etc]

Linus: We did indeed have some alternate instruction set, and while I still am not really supposed to talk about it, I can say that we did have a public demonstration of mixing instruction sets. We had a technology showcase
where you could run x86 instructions side-by-side with Java byte code (actually, it was a slightly extended pico-java, iirc).

I think the app we showed running was running DOOM on top of Linux, where the Linux parts were a totally standard x86 distribution, but the DOOM binary was a specially compiled version where part of the game was actually compiled pico-Java. And the CPU ended up running them both the same way -- as a JIT down to the native VLIW instruction set.

(The reason for picking DOOM was just that source code was available, and the core parts of the game were small enough that it was easy to set it up as a demonstration -- and it was obviously visually interesting.)

There were more things going on internally, but I can't really talk about them. And I wasn't actually personally

Linus Torvalds: "Linux Is Much Bigger Than Me!" ...continued from page 3 Q: Recently, you seemed to slam Subversion and CVS, questioning their basic architecture. Now that you've got responses from the Subversion community, do you stand corrected, or are you still unconvinced? Linus: I like making strong statements, because I find the discussion interesting. In other words, I actually tend to 'like' arguing. Not mindlessly, but I certainly tend to prefer the discussion a bit more heated, and not just entirely platonic. And making strong arguments occasionally ends up resulting in a very valid rebuttal, and then I'll happily say: "Oh, ok, you're right." But no, that didn't happen on SVN/CVS. I suspect a lot of people really don't much like CVS, so I didn't really even expect anybody to argue that CVS was really anything but a legacy system. And while I've gotten a few people who argued that I shouldn't have been quite so impolite against SVN (and hey, that's fair -- I'm really not a very polite person!), I don't think anybody actually argued that SVN was 'good'. SVN is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it. But very few people are 'proud' of it, or excited about it. Git, on the other hand, has some of the 'UNIX philosophy' behind it. Not that it is about UNIX, per se, but like original UNIX, it had a fundamental idea behind it. For UNIX, the underlying philosophy was/is that, "Everything is a file." For git, it's, â€œEverything is just an object in the content-addressable database." Q: Did they ever experiment with alternate instruction set implementations at Transmeta? [Transmeta Crusoe chip seemed like a very soft CPU -- reminding one of Burroughs B1000 interpretive machine, which actually implemented multiple virtual machines. There was one for system software, another for Cobol, another for Fortranâ€¦ If that is correct, then one could implement Burroughs 6/7000 or HP3000 like stack architecture on the chip or an instruction set suitable for JVM, etc] Linus: We did indeed have some alternate instruction set, and while I still am not really supposed to talk about it, I can say that we did have a public demonstration of mixing instruction sets. We had a technology showcase where you could run x86 instructions side-by-side with Java byte code (actually, it was a slightly extended pico-java, iirc). I think the app we showed running was running DOOM on top of Linux, where the Linux parts were a totally standard x86 distribution, but the DOOM binary was a specially compiled version where part of the game was actually compiled pico-Java. And the CPU ended up running them both the same way -- as a JIT down to the native VLIW instruction set. (The reason for picking DOOM was just that source code was available, and the core parts of the game were small enough that it was easy to set it up as a demonstration -- and it was obviously visually interesting.) There were more things going on internally, but I can't really talk about them. And I wasn't actually personally	Study computer science with an online IT degree. GuideToOnlineSchools.com has a wide selection of accredited online colleges
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