academia contribution to the kernel
Hello, A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan. Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this list to know what you people think about. My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible? In the last linux foundation report about who is sponsoring the Linux kernel development, academia contribution was less than 1.5%. Being involved in the academia as a PhD student I have my own conclusions that are very similar to the ones exposed by Thomas Gleixner in his lwn.net article "academia v. reality" (http://lwn.net/Articles/397422/). How can the Linux foundation and companies behind Linux improve this? Academia has too much resources (both human and financial) that can be used to improve Linux. LTTng and Linux Checkpoint/Restart (linux-cr) are two examples that academia can produce features to enhance the kernel. Best regards, -- Javier Martínez Canillas (+34) 682 39 81 69 PhD Student in High Performance Computing Computer Architecture and Operating System Department (CAOS) Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:05 AM, Javier Martinez Canillas <martinez.javier@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan. Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this list to know what you people think about.
My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible?
Leave contribution, frankly speaking academic experts lack the knowledge of many of new features. For example few days back I was speaking about virtualization with a professor in my University. She thought I am talking about "Virtual Reality" and started telling me the work she is doing, obviously I couldn't understand whatever she was blurring. When I joined the University, I used to talk with professors about ZFS, BTRFS but, to my surprise they had no idea about them. What I have found though about these people, they are good in their field and they are mostly involved in writing the cryptic research papers, god knows who read these papers. I also see a lot of PhD students, but they follow the same footsteps that their supervisor is following. Any ways my supervisor never discourages me from working on Linux. Good for me.
In the last linux foundation report about who is sponsoring the Linux kernel development, academia contribution was less than 1.5%.
Being involved in the academia as a PhD student I have my own conclusions that are very similar to the ones exposed by Thomas Gleixner in his lwn.net article "academia v. reality" (http://lwn.net/Articles/397422/).
How can the Linux foundation and companies behind Linux improve this? Academia has too much resources (both human and financial) that can be used to improve Linux.
Academic people, I guess are evaluated using the number of papers they have published. I have not seen people publishing papers in Linux kernel development community. They are completely on opposite ends. Academics might not like to work on Linux kernel because of the Open Source. They are always concerned with funding, fear of not generating money out of open source projects might be another reason. If Linux foundation can provide research funding, Universities would be interested in working on Linux kernel. Anyways there are Universities doing research on Linux kernel as well. For example CEPH file system started in an University, Xen is yet another example.
LTTng and Linux Checkpoint/Restart (linux-cr) are two examples that academia can produce features to enhance the kernel.
Best regards,
-- Javier Martínez Canillas (+34) 682 39 81 69 PhD Student in High Performance Computing Computer Architecture and Operating System Department (CAOS) Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain
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On May 31, 2011, at 12:42 AM, Prasad Joshi wrote:
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:05 AM, Javier Martinez Canillas <martinez.javier@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan. Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this list to know what you people think about.
My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible?
Leave contribution, frankly speaking academic experts lack the knowledge of many of new features. For example few days back I was speaking about virtualization with a professor in my University. She thought I am talking about "Virtual Reality" and started telling me the work she is doing, obviously I couldn't understand whatever she was blurring. When I joined the University, I used to talk with professors about ZFS, BTRFS but, to my surprise they had no idea about them.
Being a MSc student myself, and dealing with quite a lot of different people in the department, I must say that statement is like everything else in life: it is not nearly as true as it might appear. Generally speaking, one should not talk about systems with someone from the multimedia department, nor about kernel programming with the folks from the artificial intelligence department. For instance, one of my professors has a long history on file systems and he enjoys quite a lot spending entire afternoons sharing knowledge.
In the last linux foundation report about who is sponsoring the Linux kernel development, academia contribution was less than 1.5%.
Being involved in the academia as a PhD student I have my own conclusions that are very similar to the ones exposed by Thomas Gleixner in his lwn.net article "academia v. reality" (http://lwn.net/Articles/397422/).
How can the Linux foundation and companies behind Linux improve this? Academia has too much resources (both human and financial) that can be used to improve Linux.
Academic people, I guess are evaluated using the number of papers they have published. I have not seen people publishing papers in Linux kernel development community. They are completely on opposite ends.
I share most of this opinion, and I'll add to it. At the moment, and to my knowledge, in my computer science department there are two on-going MSc thesis focused on Linux, one of them being mine. The thing about having a thesis based on a beast such as Linux, as my supervisor always points out, is that there is a lot of room to mess things up. If you mess it up, and given the thesis has a limited time-frame, you are unable to write (or even publish) any papers. This gets even worse whenever the on-going work is part of a bigger research project, which must deliver some sort of results. Therefore, most of the academic work I'm acquainted with is fundamentally focused on providing proof-of-concept prototypes. On the field of File Systems there are quite a lot of published papers using Linux as their backbone, but most of the work is focused on providing some sort of research objective, and the implementation is presented as nothing but a PoC sustaining whatever it is that the paper claims. I'm rarely able to find a working implementation, publicly available.
Academics might not like to work on Linux kernel because of the Open Source. They are always concerned with funding, fear of not generating money out of open source projects might be another reason. If Linux foundation can provide research funding, Universities would be interested in working on Linux kernel.
I'm not sure how it goes outside Portugal, but most projects I'm aware of seldomly care about this. Usually, projects are funded through our National Science and Technology Foundation (with government ties), or by EU funding. To my knowledge, there are no restrictions on which licenses are to be applied to research projects. In my opinion, being publicly financed research, it *should* be open sourced and subject to a public license, if not public domain all the way down. Then again, this is merely my opinion. In a nutshell, I think most of the reason why academia don't develop on the kernel is because it survives on publications. The more you have, the more funding may come towards you. In order to develop to the kernel in a useful time-frame you require students/researchers who are used to do kernel programming. And my experience, though biased due to the current state of affairs in my university, dictates that we are in the Java era. Everybody knows Java, and few are those who care to learn any more C than the right amount to complete the couple of chairs in the course that actually requires such an 'archaic programming language' (as some of my colleagues enjoy pointing out, for whatever reason they fancy). Cheers. Joao --- João Eduardo Luís gpg key: 477C26E5 from pool.keyserver.eu
2011/5/31 João Eduardo Luís <jecluis@gmail.com>:
At the moment, and to my knowledge, in my computer science department there are two on-going MSc thesis focused on Linux, one of them being mine. The thing about having a thesis based on a beast such as Linux, as my supervisor always points out, is that there is a lot of room to mess things up. If you mess it up, and given the thesis has a limited time-frame, you are unable to write (or even publish) any papers. This gets even worse whenever the on-going work is part of a bigger research project, which must deliver some sort of results.
You are totally right and I second you. For me the problem is using the number of papers as a mean to measure the a research quality. As the lwn.net article says, academia is so concerned in writing papers that they forgive to solve problems while the industry is so worry in solving problems that they don't have time to write papers. Using conferences and journals to share your research results may be good for other disciplines but in the computer science world we can share our knowledge through open source software.
Therefore, most of the academic work I'm acquainted with is fundamentally focused on providing proof-of-concept prototypes. On the field of File Systems there are quite a lot of published papers using Linux as their backbone, but most of the work is focused on providing some sort of research objective, and the implementation is presented as nothing but a PoC sustaining whatever it is that the paper claims. I'm rarely able to find a working implementation, publicly available.
The proof-of-concept prototypes, analytical models and simulation probably made sense in a proprietary world where one didn't have an operating system to try a different process scheduler for example. Of course one would not develop a OS just to try something a new scheduler, but today with the high quality and good modularization of most well known open source projects (Linux, Apache, Postgresql, etc) I don't understand why academia doesn't want to use them to try their ideas. I don't expect to push the code upstream (it costs money) but that is something that students can do in their free time if they are allowed to do and develop against these projects.
I'm not sure how it goes outside Portugal, but most projects I'm aware of seldomly care about this. Usually, projects are funded through our National Science and Technology Foundation (with government ties), or by EU funding. To my knowledge, there are no restrictions on which licenses are to be applied to research projects. In my opinion, being publicly financed research, it *should* be open sourced and subject to a public license, if not public domain all the way down. Then again, this is merely my opinion.
Same thing here in Spain. Most of the projects funding is made by EU agencies and government (as far as I know). I hope that in the future pushing your code upstream can be used as a metric of research advances. Maybe could even be the goal of the project. I think academia needs to modernize and embrace open source as a way to share knowledge, otherwise we will continue publishing micro-improvements papers that has almost zero impact and are behind high prices walls (IEEE/ACM). Unless you work in a university the "knowledge" in these papers are a privilege that no one can afford. In the other hand making a git clone from an open source repo is free. I hope that in the future governments and universities understand this and change the way academia works today. Otherwise I think that "propietary" academia will have the same fate as proprietary software. -- Javier Martínez Canillas (+34) 682 39 81 69 PhD Student in High Performance Computing Computer Architecture and Operating System Department (CAOS) Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain
Hello, in the light of this discussion, there is a question which has been bugging me for quite a while about higher academia and Linux. I'm currently completing a Bachelor in "Computing and Systems"[1] in Belgium, which is very focused on programming. (Mainly C, but also C++, C#, Java...) It is a curriculum that will qualify me as an Analyst-Programmer (not sure if that's the correct term in English), in a relatively practical sense. But I really wonder which type of Master (if any?) would maximize my chances of being hired by a company working on kernel development and related matters. Surely, a MSc in Computer Engineering would be more on-topic than a "traditional" MSc in Computer Science for instance, no? What *is* the best way to go about a Master that would be related to Linux development as much as possible? (thinking about a future career in the field) Greetings, Pierre [1] http://www.provincedeliege.be/ects/2010/index_TECH-INDU_EN.html
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 11:45:45AM +0200, Pierre Vorhagen wrote:
But I really wonder which type of Master (if any?) would maximize my chances of being hired by a company working on kernel development and related matters. Surely, a MSc in Computer Engineering would be more on-topic than a "traditional" MSc in Computer Science for instance, no? What *is* the best way to go about a Master that would be related to Linux development as much as possible? (thinking about a future career in the field)
What companies want, who are looking to hire Linux kernel developers, is experience in actually doing the work, not their degrees. Hope this helps, greg k-h
On 05/31/2011 05:45 AM, Pierre Vorhagen wrote:
But I really wonder which type of Master (if any?) would maximize my chances of being hired by a company working on kernel development and related matters. Surely, a MSc in Computer Engineering would be more on-topic than a "traditional" MSc in Computer Science for instance, no? What *is* the best way to go about a Master that would be related to Linux development as much as possible?
Companies won't care much about your master. However, if you manage to take your code from a proof of concept to something production ready and merged in the Linux kernel, you have just shown the whole world that you are a kernel developer. That is the kind of thing that will get you hired. -- All rights reversed.
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 01:05:28AM +0200, Javier Martinez Canillas wrote:
Hello,
A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan. Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question
It's not too late, I'm still here, and we have many hours until the presentation (i.e about 14).
I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this list to know what you people think about.
My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible?
<snip> I think you already answered your own question, and there's not much we can do about this other than the efforts that Thomas is working on right now. Any other suggestions of how the community could help academia out would of course be appreciated. Any other question that anyone would like me to ask Linus tomorrow? Technical is always better, at least for the both of us. thanks, greg k-h
Hello! My question is very noobish and I hope Linus would not laugh at this but I am now near my wits end on this issue especially that our creative team keeps on using a Mac computer and would not migrate to gimp in order to make my life easier. On that note, my question is will Linux Kernel 3.0 finally solve the issues with Macintosh's HPS+ filesystem and finally support it or at least have a full integration between the two OS? Thank you and I am sorry if I took your precious for such a noob question. Sincerely, Brian. "Sent via BlackBerry" -----Original Message----- From: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> Sender: kernelnewbies-bounces@kernelnewbies.org Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 12:49:01 To: Javier Martinez Canillas<martinez.javier@gmail.com> Cc: kernelnewbies<kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org> Subject: Re: academia contribution to the kernel On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 01:05:28AM +0200, Javier Martinez Canillas wrote:
Hello,
A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan. Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question
It's not too late, I'm still here, and we have many hours until the presentation (i.e about 14).
I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this list to know what you people think about.
My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible?
<snip> I think you already answered your own question, and there's not much we can do about this other than the efforts that Thomas is working on right now. Any other suggestions of how the community could help academia out would of course be appreciated. Any other question that anyone would like me to ask Linus tomorrow? Technical is always better, at least for the both of us. thanks, greg k-h _______________________________________________ Kernelnewbies mailing list Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 06:43:34AM +0000, bodhimonk@gmail.com wrote:
On that note, my question is will Linux Kernel 3.0 finally solve the issues with Macintosh's HPS+ filesystem and finally support it or at least have a full integration between the two OS?
What is wrong with Linux's current implementation of HPS+ that causes you problems? Have you notified the Linux kernel developers of this? thanks, greg k-h
participants (7)
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bodhimonk＠gmail.com -
Greg KH -
Javier Martinez Canillas -
João Eduardo Luís -
Pierre Vorhagen -
Prasad Joshi -
Rik van Riel