Fengse from Ao Fei Si
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In the past few days, the 2022 Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation has arrived as scheduled. Linus Torvalds, the father of
Linux, also attended the meeting.
An episode was that a photo of himself sent from the scene made many netizens and fans sigh:
Linus is really old!
However, the 53-year-old Linus said in a chat with his old friend the Chief Open Source Officer of the Cardano Foundation that he is still full of energy.
At the same time, he also revealed a big surprise :
The next version of the Linux kernel mainline may be merged with the PR branch submitted in the Rust language.
The passion for Linux has not diminished for 30 years
Linux was born in 1991 and now has a history of 31 years.
As one of the three major operating systems in the world, Linux has become an indispensable support foundation for cloud, edge technology, embedded and Internet of Things technologies.
As the largest open source operating system, Linux is maintained by contributors in the open source community. releases a new kernel version every 6-10 weeks (that is, 1-2 months) .
Of course, most of these updates were released by Linus himself.
In 2005, Linus invented Git, which made the development of open source projects including Linux more efficient. Since then,
has maintained a relatively unchanged rhythm in the development process and release pattern of Linux kernel for at least the past 15 years.
Linus said that it seems that the work of maintaining Linux is very dull, boring and even boring, but I think this is what everyone needs. Because a stable update process can make users feel at ease.
In fact, Linus believes that what he is happiest about is that the Linux project has not become dead even though it has been more than 30 years old.
(Original words: we’re not a dead project.)
He said that new things will still emerge in Linux that surprise and delight me, including innovation.
Therefore, this makes him still full of enthusiasm for Linux.
Next kernel version may support Rust
Rust has been named the "most popular programming language" by the Stack Overflow developer survey every year since 2016 .
Many people also began to call for adding support for the Rust language in the Linux kernel, and an organization called "Rust for Linux" was born. The main reason for this phenomenon in
is that writing in Rust will bring higher computing memory resource utilization, and is more secure .
For example, at the Linux Security Summit held in 2019, someone proposed that Rust can avoid 2/3 of the memory security problems in Android and Ubuntu through the API provided by its type system and borrow checker.
So, is it possible for Rust to become the second official language in the Linux kernel besides C? Linus also talked about this issue at the
meeting.
What is more surprising is that he said that everyone thinks that we have been avoiding risks, but in fact we will definitely add it, maybe starting from the next version of , !
In other words, the official finally decided to embrace Rust and merge PR of Rust for Linux into the mainline of the Linux kernel.
This move won bursts of applause from the audience, and Linus spent a lot of effort to calm down everyone's excitement.
You must know that the Rust support patch alone has been released to the seventh version.
However, Linus also reminded that it will only be tried in a very limited way at present.After all, when I wanted to switch to C++ to perform some kernel patch operations 25 years ago, it failed.
(It means it is definitely impossible to rewrite 25 million lines of C code in Rust.)
Then an interesting scene appeared.
Linus said that he is actually willing to trust every developer involved in Linux maintenance, but only if they do not mess up. Once
messes up, Linus said that everyone knows that he will "speak rudely". But I realized that this was very rude, so I had no choice but to apologize later.
Linus said embarrassedly that this situation was no longer the case twice, "So now, please allow me to apologize to the programmers who wrote Rust. ." (manual dog head)
The pressure is now Came to Rust.
“Open source can never guarantee 100% security”
Finally, the topic turned to open source security.
Recently, the Linux Foundation's OpenSSF (Open Source Security Foundation) revealed that they will spend US$150 million on security protection for open source software.
Regarding this, Linus said that no open source project, including the Linux kernel, can expect to be 100% safe and 100% bug-free.
"If the bug does not appear in the hardware, it will appear in the software. If it does not appear in your program, it will appear in someone else's program." (manual dog head)
" The only way is to establish multi-layer protection (layers of security) .”
He further explained that the Linux kernel is just one layer of the entire application stack. Within the kernel, different parts of the process already have multiple layers of security.
The most important thing for developers responsible for building the entire stack is to have an idea of what to do if a security vulnerability occurs at any layer in the stack.
One More Thing
The latest version of the Linux kernel is currently 5.19. Whether the next version of in Linus' mouth is called 5.20 or 6.0 has also aroused discussion among many netizens.
Most people think it should be called 6.0 -
not only because this version may finally incorporate the major update of Rust, but also don't forget that Linux version numbers have never been like "big numbers", such as the previous 3.19 After the version ended, it jumped directly to 4.0~
. What do you think?
Reference link:
https://venturebeat.com/2022/06/21/linus-torvalds-after-30-years-linux-is-not-a-dead-project/
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