Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel , Director of Open Source at VMWare, spoke about the future of Linux and the development of this magnificent project during the first virtual kernel summit due to the pandemic.
In this Conference they have reviewed many aspects, from the unusual size of Linux 5.8 kernel, as we mentioned, to other aspects of the future of the project. In terms of size, it appears that the confinement has been partly to blame, with further contributions having the developers confined at home. That is, SARS-CoV-2 is accelerating some technologies.
In addition, it has ensured that none of the developers have been affected by the virusAlthough Torvalds was concerned about one of its developers who remained offline for a month or two. But it eventually turned out that the problem was a repetitive stress injury, very common among software developers.
For his part, Hohndel has also been talking about the diversity in the community development of Linux, something current due to the demonstrations and riots that are taking place around the world due to the death of Floyd. With some black leaders such as Kelsey Hightower and Byyan Liles, although most of them are all white, with a large presence of Chinese and Indians as is evident in the summits above the kernel. In fact, Torvalds himself recognized that there are other communities, such as that of some cloud projects, that are more heterogeneous than them ...
There was also room for review work that they are doing now, and which according to Torvalds is basically 'literally something very fundamental, we are cleaning and troubleshooting. […] Linux is boring and it should be.«. But it is boring for some, as for others it is extremely interesting, especially if you like the lowest level interaction with the hardware.
About the future of Linux developmentI've already commented at times that Linus won't last forever, and that Greg is his right hand man who could take over. This problem was also discussed at this summit, as most of the current leaders are over 50 years old. Torvalds assured «For us there is nothing more interesting than interacting at a low level with the hardware and really controlling everything that is happening. So don't get me wrong, the cores aren't boring, but it's definitely true that the main people have been around for decades. Yes, we are getting old.«.
Many older developers They have already moved into maintenance and administration and have left the front line of development. Torvalds himself is a case: «I don't like the word administration, because I don't consider myself an administrator, but it is actually what I do.«. Now the developers in their 20s or 30s are the ones who are really doing the programming work.
Furthermore, Torvalds remembered another big problem that have: "We don't have enough maintainers. Turns out, it's really hard to find people who are maintainers. It's interesting and challenging, but one of the downsides of being a kernel maintainer is that you have to be there all the time. Maybe it's not 24 hours a day, but every day that you react to email, you have to be there. […] It takes time, it takes experience. To have done that for a while, as a maintainer from below to start crawling and then earn the trust of enough people.«.
Hohndel also asked Torvalds about whether C programmers could be transformed into new COBOL programmers from the 2030s. Linus replied: «I think C is still one of the top 10 languages. People are actively looking to do drivers and things that are not very important to the kernel, for example in Rust. People have been seeing that for years. I am convinced that it will happen one day.»
There was even room for talk about Apple and its move towards ARM, abandoning x86. Linus believes that the current hierarchy of architectures will change and ensures that: «For the last 10 years or more I have been complaining that it was difficult to find ARM hardware that is usable for development. It does exist, but so far they haven't been a real competition for x86.«. There are things like AWS and its Graviton processors, but Torvalds doesn't like the cloud: «We kernel developers want to have a machine in front of you. […] I refuse to develop basically anything that I can't use as my desktop«.
To all this, Hohndel made a joke saying that "Apple, if you're listening, get Linus one of the first ARM laptops«.