Ottawa Linux Symposium 10, Day 1

The tenth annual Ottawa Linux Symposium kicked off Wednesday in Canada’s capital, just a few blocks from the country’s parliament building, in a conference centre in the midst of being torn down. The symposium started with the traditional State of the Kernel address, this year by Matthew Wilcox. Among the dozens of talks and plenaries held the first day was kernel wireless maintainer John Linville’s Tux on the Air: the State of Linux Wireless Networking.

The Kernel: 10 Years in Review

Matthew Wilcox gave the traditional opening address this year in place of Linux Weekly News’s Jonathan Corbet, who has done it for several years and has been a staple of OLS’s proceedings. Wilcox introduced himself as a kernel hacker since 1998, whose work history includes stints at Genedata, Linuxcare, and Intel, where he is today.

Getting down to business after a few minutes battling with both the overhead projector and the room’s sound system, Wilcox gave a brief history of Linux kernel development. As most regular Linux users know, the kernel 2.6 tree has been around for quite a few years. This is a change from the old way, he explained, where stable releases came out as even numbers such as 2.0.x, 2.2.x, and 2.4.x, with development releases coming out as 2.1.x, 2.3.x, and 2.5.x. Minor kernel releases came out every week or so, with a new stable release approximately every three years. With the 2.6.x kernel, each version is itself a stable release, coming out approximately every three months, each with somewhat less dramatic changes than earlier major releases had.

With the history lesson over, Wilcox explained how kernel development itself is done. With each kernel version, there is a brief merge period, in which tens of thousands of patches are submitted through git, a large and scalable source management utility written specifically for the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. The purpose of using git, he explained, is primarily so that everyone is using the same tool. Mercurial, he said, is a comparable tool, but git is preferred for uniformity. CVS, he said, is not scalable enough for the task.

Why should the kernel be changed at all, Wilcox asked. New features are needed, new hardware is made, and new bugs are found. There is always need for change. He noted that 10 years ago, multiprocessor systems were expensive and poorly supported by Linux, but now it is difficult to get a computer without multiple processor cores. And now Linux runs on everything from 427 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world to a watch made by IBM. Over the last 10 years, Wilcox noted, from kernel 2.3 to 2.6.26, Linux has gone from supporting approximately six hardware architectures to some 25.

As an example of Linux’s changes over the last decade, Wilcox said that in kernel 1.2, symmetric multiprocessing was not supported at all. In kernel 2.0, SMP support began, with spin locks being introduced in 2.2 to allow multiple processors to handle the same data structures. Kernel 2.4 introduced more and better spinlocks, and by kernel 2.6, Linux had the ability to have one processor write to a data structure without interrupting another’s ability to use it.

After a discussion of details about improvements in the Linux kernel from wireless networking to SATA hard drive support to filesystem changes to security and virtualisation, Wilcox wrapped up his presentation when he ran out of time with a summary of improvements in recent kernel releases and what we can expect in the near future.

Since Corbet’s talk a year ago, Wilcox said, kernel 2.6.23 introduced unlimited command length. 2.6.24 introduced virtual machines with anti-fragmentation. 2.6.25 added TASK_KILLABLE to allow processes in uninterruptable sleep to be killed, although he said it is still imperfect and some help is needed with that. 2.6.26 added read-only bind mounts.

On the table for the upcoming Kernel Summit, Wilcox said, are asynchronous operations. The future holds Btrfs, better solid state device support, and SystemTap, among other things.

Wireless networking support in Linux

The next session I attended was called Tux On The Air: The State Of Linux Wireless Networking, by John Linville of Red Hat, who introduced himself as the Linux kernel maintainer for wireless LANs. Wireless, he admitted from the outset, is a weak spot in Linux, quoting Jeff Garzik: “They just want their hardware to work.”

Linux wireless drivers typically used to have the wireless network stack built right into the drivers, meaning large amounts of duplication, and causing what Linville called “full MAC hardware” to appear to be normal Ethernet devices to the kernel. Full MAC hardware, he explained, is wireless hardware with on-board firmware. Many recent wireless devices have taken after Winmodems, he said, and provide only basic hardware to transmit and receive, with all the work done by the driver in kernels. This he called “SoftMAC.”

After a couple of other approaches were tried, SoftMAC wireless device drivers started using a common stack called mac80211. This proved popular with developers and eliminates a lot of duplicated code. Most new wireless drivers in Linux, he said, now use mac80211. mac80211 was merged into the Linux kernel tree in 2.6.22, with specific device drivers using it following in subsequent versions.

Linville showed a chart of some wireless devices and whether or not they used mac80211, and cited vendors for good or bad behaviour in cooperating with the Linux community to get drivers out for their hardware. Good corporate citizens, he said, include Intel and Atheros, while Broadcom, concerned with regulatory issues around opening up its hardware, refuses to help in any way. He repeatedly suggested that we vote with our dollars and support wireless device vendors who make an effort to support Linux.

The regulatory issues, Linville said, are, unfortunately, “not entirely unfounded.” Regulations vary by jurisdiction, but the main concern is about allowing device operation outside of the rules to which they were designed. Vendors are expected to ensure compliance with regulations on pain of being shut down. Some vendors, he noted, proactively support Linux in spite of this.

Regulators, he said, are not worried so much about people using wireless devices slightly outside of their normal bounds, but rather about people using wireless devices to interfere with other systems, such as aviation systems. As long as vendors keep such interference difficult to do, they believe they are within compliance with the regulators, and so keeping drivers closed source and effecting security through obscurity helps them achieve that.

Wireless driver development represents a busy part of overall Linux kernel development, Linville said. He noted that his name as the sign-off on patches essentially represents wireless development in the kernel. In kernel 2.6.24, 4.3% of merged patches were signed off by him, putting him in fifth place. In kernel 2.6.25, this was up to 5.0%, and by kernel 2.6.26, Linville signed off on 5.6% of all merged kernel patches, bringing him up to fourth place.

More information about wireless support in Linux can be found at linuxwireless.org.

That’s some of the best of the first of four days at the 10th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium. More tomorrow.