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This week at LWN: Debian's election season: old firmware and new contributors

11/11/2008  
Longtime LWN readers will be aware of your editor's tendency toward the publishing of wild predictions at the beginning of each year. The 2007 predictions irritated some Debian developers and users by suggesting that, after getting the Etch release out the door, the project would go back to arguing about firmware issues. At the end of the year, it became necessary to acknowledge that this prediction, like so many others, had failed to come to pass. In retrospect, the error in this prediction was obvious: the Debian Project traditionally saves the firmware argument for the end of the release process. After all, they need to find some way to delay a release once it's looking close to ready.
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This week at LWN: Plugging into GCC

10/20/2008  
Almost one year ago, LWN examined the GCC plugin mechanism - or, more exactly, the lack of such a mechanism. Despite the increasing level of interest in adding special-purpose modules to the GCC compiler, GCC has no API which allows this addition to be done. So developers working on GCC extensions are faced with the daunting prospect of patching their code directly into the compiler. This situation looked unlikely to change; the Free Software Foundation's fears that a plugin mechanism would be used by proprietary extensions was just too strong. One year later, though, things look a little different; there may be a plugin-capable GCC available in the (relatively) near future.
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This week at LWN: Tracing: no shortage of options

08/07/2008  
Three weeks ago, LWN looked at the renewed interest in dynamic tracing, with an emphasis on SystemTap. Tracing is a perennial presence on end-user wishlists; it remains a handy tool for companies like Sun Microsystems, which wish to show that their offerings (Solaris, for example) are superior to Linux. It is not surprising that there is a lot of interest in tracing implementations for Linux; the main surprise is that, after all this time, Linux still does not have a top-quality answer to DTrace - though, arguably, Linux had a working tracing mechanism long before DTrace made its appearance.
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This week at LWN: Notes on the Viacom ruling

07/17/2008  
Google's purchase of YouTube always seemed questionable to some observers: it looked as if Google were buying itself a whole new source of copyright lawsuits. One of the benefits of that purchase came through on July 2, when a U.S. District Court ordered Google to hand over its complete set of YouTube traffic logs, containing information about every video viewed on the service. See Groklaw for the full text of the order. If this order stands (and it appears that Google will not appeal it), millions of users worldwide will have their viewing data handed over to a litigious entertainment industry company. There's a couple of important implications to draw from this turn of events, so LWN will venture a little far afield and take a look.
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This week at LWN: The rest of the vmsplice() exploit story

03/13/2008  
Back in February, LWN published a discussion of the vmsplice() exploit which showed how the failure to check permissions for a read operation led to a buffer overflow within the kernel. Subsequently, a linux-kernel reader pointed out that the article stopped short of a complete explanation: this is not an ordinary buffer overflow exploit. Travel schedules and such prevented the writing of an immediate followup, but your editor would still like to tell the full story. So this article picks up where the last one left off and describes how the vmsplice() exploit makes use of this buffer overflow to take over the system.
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This week at LWN: A ten-year timeline (part 1)

01/20/2008  
LWN is about to celebrate a birthday. Picking the true anniversary of an enterprise like LWN can be a bit tricky - there are many points which could be said to mark the true birth of the organization. After some thought, we have decreed that LWN.net was born on January 30, 1998. So we have a tenth anniversary coming up. That's a long time - far longer than any of us thought we would be doing this. Life is funny that way, somehow.
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This week at LWN: Enterprise realtime and cooperative development

12/16/2007  
At the end of November, LWN posted a pointer to Novell's announcement for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Realtime offering. The resulting comments were surprisingly negative. Some readers took exception to the language of the release - though it really is just the standard tortured English which is seemingly required for press releases. But others question the need for realtime response in"enterprise" settings. Anybody who is still wondering about the value of that product will be doubly confused now that Red Hat has announced a realtime distribution service of its own. Clearly somebody sees a need for deterministic response in big corporate deployments.
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Kernel space: The enterprise real-time feud

12/14/2007  
At the end of November, LWN posted a pointer to Novell's announcement for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Realtime offering. The resulting comments were surprisingly negative. Readers questioned the need for realtime response in"enterprise" settings. Anybody who is still wondering about the value of that product will be doubly confused now that Red Hat has announced a realtime distribution service of its own. It's not surprising that the two companies most interested in selling Linux-related services into the enterprise market have announced offerings within a week of each other. Whatis surprising is the amount of silly sniping which has come with these releases.
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This week at LWN: The Grumpy Editor encounters Firebug

09/05/2007  
Those who have been paying close attention may have noticed a number of changes to the LWN site over the last few weeks. Most of those changes are not visible; our quaint early-90's table-oriented HTML is slowly giving away to a more contemporary design which makes use of the features of cascading style sheets. This sort of work involves a lot of change-and-reload cycles in an effort to figure out why something is not rendering as your editor intended. CSS is a powerful but sometimes obscure technology. One tool your editor wishes he had stumbled across earlier is Firebug, a Firefox extension designed to help with just this sort of work.
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This week at LWN: Still waiting for swap prefetch

08/04/2007  
It has been almost two years since LWN covered the swap prefetch patch. This work, done by Con Kolivas, is based on the idea that if a system is idle, and it has pushed user data out to swap, perhaps it should spend a little time speculatively fetching that swapped data back into any free memory that might be sitting around. Then, when some application wants that memory in the future, it will already be available and the time-consuming process of fetching it from disk can be avoided.
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