Kernel: World Domination, Intel's Awful Patching and Supporting the NDS32 Architecture
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Linux Foundation on Track for Best Year Ever as Open Source Dominates
Zemlin noted that Linux now represents 100 percent of the supercomputer market, 90 percent of the cloud, 82 percent of the smartphone market and 62 percent of the embedded systems market. He added that in every market Linux has entered, it eventually dominates.
The Linux Foundation in 2018 is about much more than Linux and is home to the world's largest SSL/TLS certificate authority with Let's Encrypt. It is also home to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which runs the Kubernetes container orchestration project.
Zemlin noted the Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux project is now backed by 12 major auto vendors and is slated for production in millions of vehicles worldwide. The Hyperledger project is another Linux Foundation led effort, which is developing enterprise blockchain technologies.
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Linux Kernel Developer Criticizes Intel for Meltdown, Spectre Response
At the Open Source Summit North America here on Aug. 29, Greg Kroah-Hartman warned attendees about the severe impact the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities could have on them, as well as detailed how Linux kernel developers are dealing with the flaws.
Kroah-Hartman is one of the world's leading Linux kernel developers, with responsibility for maintaining the stable Linux kernel, and is employed by the Linux Foundation as a Fellow. During his talk, Kroah-Hartman detailed the root impact and the response of Linux kernel developers for seven variants of Meltdown and Spectre, though he saved his strongest criticism for Intel's initial disclosure.
"Jann Horn discovered the first issues in July of 2017, but it wasn't until Oct. 25 of last year that some of us in the kernel community heard rumors of the flaw," he said. "That's a long time, and we only heard rumors because another very large operating system vendor told Intel to get off their tails and tell us about it."
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Supporting the NDS32 Architecture
It looks like there's no controversy over this port, and it should fly into the main tree. One reason for the easy adoption is that it doesn't touch any other part of the kernel—if the patch breaks anything, it'll break only that one architecture, so there's very little risk in letting Green make his own choices about what to include and what to leave out. Linus's main threshold will probably be, does it compile? If yes, then it's okay to go in.
The situation may start to become interesting if other parts of the kernel begin offering special behaviors for the NDS32 architecture, and if those behaviors start deviating too far from other architectures. For example, some architectures have special memory managing features that the kernel proper can take advantage of. Once NDS32 starts influencing code in other parts of the kernel, that likely would be the time Green's patches start to get a lot more scrutiny.
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