Lennart Poettering Talks Up His New Linux Vision That Involves Btrfs

[gilboa]

[quote]With Windows not only do I get the latest apps the second they come out, but they backport system software like .NET 4.5.1 all the way back to Vista, which came out seven years ago![/qoute]

Given the fact that Windows lacks any type of centralized package installation, *uninstallation* and/or update management system, making it virtually impossible to automatically install, cleanly uninstall and update a Windows machine (and that also includes non-OS-related *Microsoft* software!), I doubt that Windows can be used as a *good* example.

Oh, and did I mention that many Windows application carry their own, potentially conflicting versions of std/crt (MSVCRT*.dll, etc)?

Right now the latest RHEL has the 2.6.32-431 kernel. No Haswell support, no support for that fancy new 10gbe NICs or SAS controller. That kernel came out in Dec 2009. Yeah, distros always freeze the vanilla kernel and customize it, so there is SOME new hardware support, but it's a drop in the bucket.

All the (relevant) latest HW kernel drivers are back-ported regularly to existing RHEL releases.
Case of point, I had no issues running EL6 on a brand new R2208LT2HKC4 server (4S, 4 x Xeon E5-4600v2, 14 x Intel 10GbE [82599], SAS RAID, 2 x Mellanox 40GbE). Actually, come to think about it, I had far more issues installing Fedora 20 on the same machine.

[gotwig]

No Swap?

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Does_btrfs_support_swap_files.3F

I never used SWAP files, but always swap partitions, why do distros use swap partitions instead? Its so undynamic :/ Microsoft Windows has swap files since 2001 by default

[GreatEmerald]

The idea is crazy enough to work, but it will have to be much more refined. For one, he didn't explain what happens if one has LibreOffice 166 running and attempts to launch Firefox. That's a dependency conflict, since Firefox requires older runtime than what is running. And then what about runtimes that require other runtimes? What about apps that require a mix of two runtime versions? Basically, dependencies are hard.

[Sonadow]

[QUOTE=gilboa;437090]

With Windows not only do I get the latest apps the second they come out, but they backport system software like .NET 4.5.1 all the way back to Vista, which came out seven years ago![/qoute]

Oh, and did I mention that many Windows application carry their own, potentially conflicting versions of std/crt (MSVCRT*.dll, etc)?.

They install to different locations in the file system where there is no chance of interference, like how one can have both gtk2 and gtk3 libraries in the same system (or qt3 and qt4).

Your point?

[jollyd]

I am not sure if I understood all the details of Lennart's new ideas.
Can someone point me how different would this be from what SUN tried with ZFS + PKG on OpenSolaris a few years ago ?
Thank you.
Best regards,

jollyd

[Nille]

like how one can have both gtk2 and gtk3 libraries in the same system (or qt3 and qt4).

Thats technical not a problem. But the Distributions prefer there big blob.

[brosis]

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index...._swap_files.3F

I never used SWAP files, but always swap partitions, why do distros use swap partitions instead? Its so undynamic :/ Microsoft Windows has swap files since 2001 by default

Because swap file efficiency will be extremely bad on BTRFS, due to how BTRFS manages data (wikipedia has documented this). Different swap partition provides raw access to disk. Because today with GPT its possible to create a lot of partitions even on one disk, there is no difference in having swap reside on different partition compared to having implement a solutions in existing BTRFS code to create a processing window only for swap files.

[brosis]

They install to different locations in the file system where there is no chance of interference, like how one can have both gtk2 and gtk3 libraries in the same system (or qt3 and qt4).

Your point?

No they don't, they install in own folders with hardlinks in winsxs, creating a huge messy database of 999 versions with own security problems. This is nothing, but an evolution of DLLhell.

[nightmarex]

Good luck trying to unify all the differences between every single distribution on the planet.

Especially those like

- *-dev vs *-devel
- /lib32 + /lib (pre-multiarch Debian-based, Gentoo and Arch) vs /lib/<arch> (Debian-based multiarch) vs /lib + /lib64 (rpm-based)
- different distributions installing certain packages in different locations (at one point OpenSUSE installs KDE into /opt, not sure if they do this now)
- different naming conventions, especially for libraries (e.g.: Mageia / Mandriva uses libfoo and lib64foo, Fedora uses libfoo and libfoo.i686, OpenSUSE uses libfoo and libfoo-32bit)

The reason it seems hard is because people think about it the wrong way. Look at steam, okay see where I am heading with this? Make a program that acts like steam/playonlinux that "installs" what the fuck ever app you want and runs it
using local versions of files if they are adequate if not using included libs all this within it's own encapsulated system... ez. Then, minus the kernel and other essitals such as video drivers and whatnot everything would be run with this helper app. Then again we need a way to make virus easier to spread like we need herpes. Fuck that, I like the fact distros have there own eco-system.

[rdnetto]

It looks like Lennart has finally embraced the idea of designing his own operating system.
A constant theme throughout his work seems to be that he values the envisioned use case over the system's design, which means he ends up creating ugly, overcomplicated, useful things. (e.g. Pulseaudio, systemd).

This basically takes the ideas from NixOS and integrates them with btrfs. I use systemd and btrfs on my system, but I definitely do not like the idea of btrfs being a requirement - it is slow compared to other file systems. More generally, each component integrated removes a degree of choice. He recognizes that Linux is successful because it is generic, but doesn't realise that such an idea would make it less so.

I have no doubt that his idea is well thought out, and could form the basis of a new distro that would be quite useful to some people. (Had it been created a decade ago, it would have been perfect for Android.) But it is definitely not something that should be accepted by existing distros - therein lies the start of the embrace & extinguish cycle.