While all is 'calm and steady and boring' with the next kernel, Linux creator Torvalds tells an Open Source Summit crowd exactly how he feels about almost everything else.
  • qaz@lemmy.world
    107·
    7 months ago

    That’s not to say the two men don’t think AI will be helpful in the future. Indeed, Torvalds noted one good side effect already: “NVIDIA has gotten better at talking to Linux kernel developers and working with Linux memory management,” because of its need for Linux to run AI’s large language models (LLMs) efficiently.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
      86·
      7 months ago

      so THATS why we are getting better nvidia support.

      i knew it just couldnt be from the goodness of their newly converted hearts.

      • Miaou@jlai.lu
        64·
        7 months ago

        You didn’t know GPUs are used for training/running DNN?

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
          211·
          7 months ago

          sure, but am i surprised this is the only reason they improved desktop drivers for us? no.

          am i disappointed? yeah, a little.

    • stembolts@programming.dev
      591·
      7 months ago

      Hahaha. I love it. Fuck closed source hardware gatekeepers.

      Nice to see them groveling for performance.

      Kneel!!

      C’mon, I can joke. Such a cathartic paragraph to read. Intractable cunts.

  • gnutrino@programming.devEnglish
    85·
    7 months ago

    Did not know the thing about purposefully adding rogue tabs to kconfig files to catch poorly written parsers. That’s fucking hilarious and I’d love to have the kind of clout to get away with something like that rather than having to constantly work around other people’s mistakes.

    • Toribor@corndog.socialEnglish
      83·
      7 months ago

      I write a lot of scripts that engineers need to run. I used to really try to make things ‘fail soft’ so that even if one piece failed the rest of the script would keep running and let you know which components failed and what action you needed to take to fix the problem.

      Eventually I had so many issues with people assuming that any errors that didn’t result in a failure were safe to ignore and crucial manual steps were being missed. I had to start making them ‘fail hard’ and stop completely when a step failed because it was the only way to get people to reliably perform the desired manual step.

      Trying to predict and account for other people’s behavior is really tricky, particularly when a high level of precision is required.

      • unreliable@discuss.tchncs.de
        301·
        7 months ago

        It is a developer milestone :) when you learn to be a resilient applicant is about recovery situation you perfect understanding. Fail fast everything else. Repeat 1000 times, you have something

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
        4·
        7 months ago

        This is why I enjoy programming libraries only I will ever use. “Do I need to account for user ignorance and run a bunch of early exit conditions at the beginning of this function to avoid throwing an exception? Naww, fuck it, I know what I’m doing.”

        • jcg@halubilo.social
          3·
          7 months ago

          It’s the quickest way to prove to yourself that you know what you’re doing… Most of the time, anyway…

  • Nemoder@lemmy.ml
    43·
    7 months ago

    Hohndel agreed but added that the industry needs to support these smaller projects – and not only with money. “Companies need to engage with these projects. Have your company adopt a couple of such projects and just participate. Read the code, review the patches, and provide moral support to the maintainers. It’s as simple as that.”

    Really glad he said this, I keep seeing posts about how all these big companies could solve the problem by just throwing money at small projects and while that is better than nothing it would help way more to have their own developers helping to review and fix issues.

  • vort3@lemmy.ml
    19·
    7 months ago

    Is there a link to this talk (or interview, or whatever this is) but in a video format, or at least a text without all those «SEE ALSO» self ads?

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    7·
    7 months ago

    Does anyone have the link for the source of the interview? I’ve looked through the article and couldn’t see it at first glance.

  • hungrybread [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    7 months ago

    In addition, hardware developers reinvent old ways of doing things and only learn by making all the same mistakes that have been made before. It’s sad, but true.

    This same criticism is validly launched at software devs all the time lol.

    One thing I’ve anecdotalally seen and heard is hardware guys indicating that something is rock solid and solved because it’s old, so building on top of it isn’t a problem. Obviously we have to build on the old to get to the new, but if we just skip auditing hardware due to age we end up deploying vulnerable hardware globally. Spectre and Meltdown are an interesting example where I’ve heard from at least one distinguished professor that “everyone” believed branch prediction design/algorithms were essentially done. Was it adequately assessed from a security POV? Clearly not, but was it assessed from a security POV in general? I have no idea, but it would be nice as a tech enthusiast and software guy to see the other side of the fence take these things seriously in a more public way, in particular when it comes to assessing old hardware for new attack vectors.

    • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      4·
      7 months ago

      Spectre and Meltdown are an interesting example where I’ve heard from at least one distinguished professor that “everyone” believed branch prediction design/algorithms were essentially done.

      Interesting to hear this.

      Was it adequately assessed from a security POV? Clearly not, but was it assessed from a security POV in general? I have no idea, but it would be nice as a tech enthusiast and software guy to see the other side of the fence take these things seriously in a more public way, in particular when it comes to assessing old hardware for new attack vectors.

      Right.