Alan Cox on The Future of Linux

Earlier this week, I was present at a HOT or NOT session, organised
by Sioux. This session included a talk by
Alan Cox on The Future of Linux.

Philippe,
it was definitely worth it! :-)

It was the first time I attended a talk by Alan, and I must say I was greatly
surprised. He had a very nice presentation, a clear voice and overall a pretty
entertaining way of presenting his material. The content of the presentation
was fairly technical and dry, which made it extra hard to present it in the
way he did.

One nice thing I’ll remember form his talk is about the discrepancy in
computer hardware evolution. Intel and AMD keep on putting more and more cores
into their processors. Each time you buy a new computer, your amount of
pre-installed RAM has at least doubled. But when speaking about hard disks, we
only see the size increase — 40MB to 1GB tot 500GB to even more
today — but their speed is still the same! Sure, we went from plain
ATA to SATA and PATA (never mind SCSI), but that’s only a performance increase
of roughly 20%. This introduces many challenges to software land, as people
expect to be able to download stuff at more MB per second as their hard disk
can handle. Or data centres are more often than not waiting longer for a 1TB
backup to complete than their mean time between backups. Alan says: “Hard
disks today are more and more like tapes. Great for linear access, awful for
random access”.

Another interesting thought was about the evolution of the GPU back onto the
CPU. This puts Intel ahead, and ATI is “safe” too, under the hood of AMD.
But what will nVidia do?

I was also happy to hear that he believes Europe is doing a good job in the
battle against American Software Patents lobbyists.

Overall, an interesting night. Thank you Sioux.