Interview: Linus Torvalds – I don't read code any more

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Linus-Torvalds-I-don-t-read-code-any-more-1748462.html

by hiperlink • 14 years ago

112 69 14 years ago

I don't read interviews with Linus Torvalds anymore. He's a harsh and selfish person and seems like his number one hobby is not software development, but swearing at people.

thaumaturgy• 14 years ago

You can learn something from anyone, even someone you disagree with.

jlgreco7• 14 years ago

You would be a fool to think that "What Linus gets to the front-page of HN for" is a representative sample of what he does.

ghshephard4• 14 years ago

"He's a harsh and selfish person"

Harsh, perhaps (a function of his brutal honesty). But, I don't think you would find more than 1 out of 10 people who would agree with you that he's selfish. He did license the linux kernel via the GPL, and, he's dedicated pretty much his entire software to writing software that you can freely copy, modify, and distribute.

wyclif2• 14 years ago

Agreed. Of course, "harsh" is a relative term. But I think if most programmers and devs could see all of what Linus has put up with over the years on the LKML spread before them, they'd quickly reassess the meaning of "patience."

pavanky• 14 years ago

May be intermediate is confusing stubborn for selfish ?

dnc2• 14 years ago

Here is what Linus Torvalds said on the topic in the other interview: "In many ways, I actually think the real idea of open source is for it to allow everybody to be "selfish", not about trying to get everybody to contribute to some common good. In other words, I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place". No, open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons." Link to the whole interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419231 .

z3phyr• 14 years ago

Linus is like a large coconut. Harsh looking from outside but gentle inside.

debacle• 14 years ago

And delicious.

wyclif2• 14 years ago

Oh, how I wish h-online would get that spreading an interview like this over four pages, just so they can grab more page impressions for the ads, isn't cool.

curiousdannii• 14 years ago

Print view: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Linus-Torval...

Luyt• 14 years ago

Worse, they have animated GIFs in their ads in the right column. Totally detracts from reading.

wisty• 14 years ago

Deceptive title.

tl;dr:

Linus doesn't read kernel patches anymore, because subsytem maintainers do and just send him a summary. He's been working with them for about 10 years, so he trusts them. Most of his work on the kernel is sorting out arguments, and making sure things go to the right person.

dkroy2• 14 years ago

Okay, I should have read your post, we wrote the same thing...

derleth• 14 years ago

> Most of his work on the kernel is sorting out arguments, and making sure things go to the right person.

tl;dr for your tl;dr:

Linus Torvalds is, in fact, a good manager.

est2• 14 years ago

So does this makes GIT an ERP system, for geeks with code?

Zenst• 14 years ago

I agree about the title, I would of gone with:

"How I learned to delegate and realise people were part of the asernal of tools available at my command prompt"

andrewljohnson2• 14 years ago

Deceptive is not the right word. How about attention-grabbing, or excellent, to describe the headline instead?

First of all, it's a direct quote from the article. Second, I think some people (like you) object to any attention-grabbing headline, for no reason at all. It was a good article, and that was a good quote to use to get people to click and read.

I can't even imagine how terrible Hacker News would be if all the titles were like what one of the people who responded to your comment said:

"How I learned to delegate and realise people were part of the asernal of tools available at my command prompt"

This is a drab, dull, and terrible headline.

manaskarekar• 14 years ago

> Second, I think some people (like you) object to any attention-grabbing headline, for no reason at all. It was a good article, and that was a good quote to use to get people to click and read.

I think that's unfair. If an attention grabbing headline is deceptive but leads to a good article, it's still deceptive.

mquander• 14 years ago

The replacement suggestion is only bad because it's too long, and it's still better than what's there. "Torvalds interview on community, kernel development, & more" would be a way better headline.

The quality of a headline has nothing to do with attention-grabbiness; it's a good headline if I can read it and know whether I'm interested in the contents. To optimize for attention-grabbiness over helpfulness is to defect in the HN posting game.

shadyabhi2• 14 years ago

On a different node, I am disappointed that kernel developers haven't been able to solve this bug https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48721 since last 2 months. I am an avid linux fan but this drives me crazy.

Tmmrn2• 14 years ago

Do you boot with some power saving parameters like i915.rc6=7? If so, remove ALL of them and try again.

Is that the HM65 chipset in that notebook? I have a Ivy Bridge CPU on the HM77 chipset and I had initially some problems with the scaling not working correctly but after a few reboots cpupower has worked without ever having a problem anymore...

shadyabhi2• 14 years ago

http://sprunge.us/TEPU is my hardware and this bug is produced only on random reboots/resumes. Earlier, I had i915.rc6=7 in my kernel parameter, but I have removed it now. I rebooted and no issues but as I said, this issue happens on random reboots/suspend-resumes so I can never be sure.

dkroy2• 14 years ago

Very very clever title, this is an example of context giving a different meaning. He still reads code, just not from his trusted network of kernel developers since he has worked with them so long, and it has already gone through a few layers of people. He also doesn't want to shoot down all of their hard work.

zanny• 14 years ago

I want to pull out a quote I really like:

> Now people are taking adding a USB device for granted, but realistically that did not use to be the case. That whole being able to hotplug devices, we've had all these fundamental infrastructure changes that we've had to keep up with.

Did anyone else notice this? In the last ~5 years, half a decade, we went from every major OS crashing on hot swaps or usb plugins or not recognizing devices or other crippling issues on hot swapping almost any hardware, to being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms.

That is really amazing tech, and in this era of touch phones and web apps, we are still having huge leaps at the lowest levels of usability.

ghshephard4• 14 years ago

Well, except for the fact that my MacBook Air and MacBook Pro crash (Kernel Fault, hard freeze, requires power cycle) on numerous USB devices - both FTDI VCP serial drivers, as well as whatever is driving the Keyspan Triplite Console box.

This has been true on pretty much every release of OS X Lion 10.7. Every two-three months I drop in a new driver from the FTDI site, and upgrade to a new patch of Lion - but both devices continue to sporadically black-screen me.

Every time I pull out a USB cable/Plug it it it's like I'm rolling dice.

The FTDI drivers on Windows XP are pretty mature (I've never had a crash on that platform), and I think they're built into recent releases of the Linux kernel - and I've heard no complaints there (or experienced them myself)- so, perhaps this is actually proving your point somewhat.

We still have a ways to go before we experience 5 9s reliability on USB Hot Plug though...

regomodo• 14 years ago

They've been there since forever in Linux.

wrl• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, we run into these FTDI panics with Monome devices all the time. I've called FTDI personally to discuss this with them (iirc it was about a year ago, and I'd been sending them panic reports for a solid 8 months before that) and they just don't seem to care.

No problems on Windows, and yes, the ftdi_sio module has been a part of the Linux source tree for quite some time (even OpenBSD has an FTDI driver).

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

I'm old enough to remember when hotplugging even a USB device was a massive pain in Linux, but didn't really think until now how far it has come along.

> being able to swap out everything including memory and CPUs without major kernel panics on most mature platforms

Are we really at that point? I know you can swap USB devices and even hard disks, but I thought that unplugging almost anything inside the computer would lock it up?

ygra• 14 years ago

It's not uncommon in servers to remove or swap things like CPUs and memory while running. The OSes running on them must (and can) handle that.

bravoyankee• 14 years ago

If I was Linus I'd be miffed about the title and the prominence of the quote. It's badly taken out of context and it's a betrayal of trust.

I felt kind of ripped off too when I got to that part. Again, it betrays the trust of Linus, who gave his time to do the interview, and the reader, who gave of their time to read it.

reedlaw• 14 years ago

If Linus doesn't read code (I know that's an exaggeration--he has trusted subordinates who do) and there are ~1000 people contributing code changes, I'm curious about who actually ensures that no one sneaks in a backdoor to the kernel. I mean if somehow something bad like that got passed on through the hierarchy all the way past Linus, would Distros just pass it on to users, or are there some other safeguards in place?

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

Every commit in the linux kernel contains at least one signed-off-by indicating just who has signed off on the patch, so your question of "who" can be answered fairly easily.

utefan001• 14 years ago

"When I was twenty I liked doing device drivers. If I never have to do a single device driver in my life again, I will be happy. Some kind of headaches I can do without." Linus Torvalds

16s2• 14 years ago

"Google has worked more on the kernel side, they've done their own filesystems."

What custom filesystem is he referring to? Does anyone know?

cdawzrd• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System

16s2• 14 years ago

GFS is user space, not kernel space.

fotoflo• 14 years ago

super interesting. thanks.

Interview: Linus Torvalds – I don't read code any more

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