This is the September 11.th
2,024. Meeting of the St. Louis Unix users group.
Gonna go out ahead and start off with the base session.
I'm gonna turn it over to you, Sean. Go ahead. If you would.
You ready?
I'm ready. Let's do it.
Alright!
Recording is on.
Good morning. All! I should be seeing my screen coming in right now.
We? We do see it. Yes.
So my name's Sean. And tonight I'm gonna do a little bit of AI show and tell.
Specifically, I'm going to present about Gemini live and V 0 by cell. So a couple.
New or updated AI tools that I think are really interesting. So I'm gonna share.
About them.
About me. I was a system administrator for several years, and then I saw this transition to cloud and devops and.
I said, Nope.
And so I switched over to software development. My current role is a tech lead.
I would also like to spend a little bit of time plugging my.
Upcoming talk. 8 days from today. At the Thursday Lug meeting.
I'm going to present.
Modern terminal showdown, Kitty versus term, so.
Yay!
So if you're someone who is using the terminal application that came with your operating system, this talk is gonna be really should be really interesting for you. Because these modern terminal apps have a lot of really cool features that you might be interested in. So please.
8 days from today at the Thursday meeting. Be there or be square, but that's enough about that one.
Let's move on with tonight's talk.
Starting with.
Jim and I live.
So.
Before we talk about Jim and I live, we should talk about what is Google Gemini.
It is Google's competitor to chat. Gpt is essentially what it is.
It was originally named Bard.
But they change the underlying model, and so they change the name of the.
Product.
As well. In my opinion this is the best.
AI chat.
For Firefox Users.
And the reason why I say that is because.
I don't really. I have a hard time trusting an AI unless it provides links.
To its sources.
And out of the major. Ai providers, the ones that provide links that I'm aware of.
Our Google Gemini.
And bing AI!
From Microsoft. Those are the 2 that will actually provide the sources.
And.
Bing only works if you're using the edge Browser. At least last time I checked, that was the case. So if you're a Firefox user like I am, you can't really use.
Being AI very easily.
And so.
Google, geminize your next best bet. And here on the right, I have a screenshot.
And at the bottom of the screenshot you can see these little squares. These are what I'm talking about, where it puts it, sources.
And related content, because.
You know the saying has been forever. Now that you can't trust everything you read on the Internet. Well, if you just treat ais like anything else you read on the Internet. Then you'll be pretty good to go right like.
Like, verify everything you read on the Internet.
Even if it's generated from an AI right. And that's pretty much simple.
And then.
We have Google, Gemini.
And.
Every one of the major companies that provides an AI Chatbot service.
So the the Google one is called Gemini, advanced.
And pretty much all these AI subscription services are about $20 a month.
And they pretty much all provide you priority, access and access to like the upgraded models and stuff like that.
Both of the subscriptions service from Google and Microsoft also.
Provide an integration with their AI and their office suite.
So for Jim and I advance. That's you know, Gmail and Google Docs and all that. You get a little chat box.
And those applications where you can use your AI to.
Help you. Proofread documents and stuff like that. I.
Haven't used that too much. I don't use office suites.
That often.
I think the 2 bullet points at the bottom are unique to the Gemini, offering.
So for some reason they lump in 2 TB of Google Storage. When you get Gemini advanced, I have no idea why that is.
It seems random to me. But whatever.
And then the very bottom bullet is the one I'm excited to talk about tonight when you sign up for Gemini advanced.
You could get access to Gemini. Live, and I say you could.
Because it's still rolling out.
So.
So yeah, but you definitely won't get access to Gemini. Live unless you're a gemini advance subscriber.
So what is Jim and I live.
It is a more. This is from Google's ad copy. So I'm gonna read it with a sleazy voice here. So.
Jim and I live is a more natural way to have free, flowing voice conversations with Gemini on your phone.
Express your thoughts freely, interrupt details, ask questions, or come back to the conversation later.
Jim and I listens and adapts to your conversational style.
In real time, so.
That is the marketing copy from Google's website.
And what I'd like to do now is actually show the technology. So I'm gonna stop.
Sharing my screen.
And if anybody can like double click on my picture, it should blow up my camera.
And zoom.
Or put me in the center. If I'm not in the center for you.
Cause I'm gonna be holding up my phone.
And hopefully, it will come through. Okay.
So I'm gonna talk through it before I do it.
No.
Room.
So I'm gonna hold up my phone.
I'm gonna hit the power button.
It's gonna pop up a thing. I'm gonna push a button, and that's gonna launch Jim and I live.
Once I launch it, I'm gonna have a back and forth conversation with it.
So if you all could be quiet during that time, and then later, we can all have a group conversation. We try to have a group conversation with later, if we want to. But for those 1st one we'll have everybody be quiet except me, and you can see how how it works. Okay.
So I'm gonna hope.
Before you start. Turn off background. Blur.
If you can.
Oh!
I think it'll come through. And it's not. It's not important. There's nothing important gonna be shown on the screen after the 1st few seconds. So.
So I'm just gonna hit this.
And then you should see down here on the right. There's a button.
And I just messed it up because I was talking one sec.
Okay.
What is.
Oci, when referring to containerization technology.
Oci.
Matt.
Stands for the open container initiative. It's a group that creates open standards for tools that build.
Ship and run containers. Think of it as the body that makes sure all the different container technologies out there basically work the same. Okay. You guys were able to hear her right? It came through. Zoom didn't mute it or anything. Okay.
Yes, we heard it.
There's nothing on the screen. It's just there's 2 buttons, one says, pause, and one says end. So if you can't.
If you can't
See the screen. It's not a big deal.
But I just paused it so that I can make sure that you could hear.
But I'm gonna go ahead and have a conversation now, and there's nothing on the screen that's important.
How does oci? How are oci containers? Ran.
Oci containers run, using a combination of things. First, st you've got the container image.
Which is like a snapshot of the software and its dependencies. Then you need a container runtime which takes that image and runs it in an isolated environment for container runtimes.
Yeah, there's a standard for container's called the Container Runtime Interface.
Or cri for short, think of it as the middleman.
It defines how container runtime should interact with tools like Kubernetes. This way you can swap out different runtimes if I'm understanding this correctly. Oci is the standard that describes.
How the containers are built.
And cri is the standard that describes how containers are ran.
Yep, that's right. Oci focuses on the building and packaging of containers.
While cri handles the runtime side of things. Oci makes sure that container images are compatible across different tools and platforms use by default.
Kubernetes doesn't use a cri by default.
But it does rely on a container. Runtime.
Traditionally.
Okay, adequate I got. I don't know. That's the 1st time it ever quit on me like that. It is being really slow tonight. I guess it's very popular right now, but once I once I quit it just prints out all the text on the screen.
But that's basically Gemini live. So you can imagine if you're, you know, driving down the highway, or you're doing the dishes or something, and you need to learn something, or you have a question.
How you can just talk back and forth to Gemini, live and learn something.
You know.
There's no sources here, though I just made a big deal about ais that provide their sources are more trustworthy. Obviously you don't get that if you're having a verbal kind of back and forth.
Can you control your phone like, bring up app, bring up maps or.
Not yet.
Now.
Finding New Years Gas station.
Not with Jim, and I live with regular Gemini. They're pretty much there like you can ask regular gemini to play a song, and it'll find it and play it.
Or set a task or a reminder. But Jim and I live doesn't quite do that yet.
Could you ask it for the source.
While.
Like.
It was answering, and you were going back and forth.
Could you say? What's your source?
Yeah.
What sources do you have for the information you provided.
The information I provided about Oci and Cri is based on my understanding of the concepts and my access to a variety of reliable sources on the Internet.
These, include.
The official websites of Oci and Cnc.
Cloud native computing foundation.
Documentation and guides from Major Cloud providers to my phone.
So I can't send you text messages or links via text.
But what I can do is provide you with the names of some reliable sources.
You can then search for them, using your phone.
You could try the websites for the open container initiative.
Is, that.
Android phone or iphone.
I have, Android, but I think it works on both.
Alright. Let's do one more. I ask it about some Linux Command line stuff, and for this one, if anybody wants to come off mute and interrupt her, and ask a follow up question.
Feel free.
What is the find? Command on Linux.
Basically, the find command helps you track down files and folders on your Linux system. You can search for things by name. Doesn't the Ls command help. You find files and folders. When would I use? Find instead of Ls.
Yeah. The Ls command shows you the files and folders in your current directory.
But what if the file you're looking for? Isn't there.
That's where find comes in. It lets you search your whole system or specific folders.
To find files based on lots of different criteria. For example, you could use find to locate all text files modified in the last week.
Or all folders bigger than a certain size, find use.
The standard globbing.
When.
Looking for several files.
No find uses a different syntax called, find expressions to search for files.
Tell me the differences between this fine syntax and regular posix, or bash-style globing.
I'm not familiar with the terms syntax in the context of globing or filematching. It's possible that it's a term, I said. Find syntax not.
Absolutely. You're right. I apologize for the misunderstanding.
So the main difference between find syntax and standard often bash-style.
Is that find offers a much richer set of options for locating files.
With gloving. You're limited to using wildcards like asterisk and to match file patterns.
Here's a breakdown of what vine can do. That globin can't complex.
Fine lets you search based on file attributes like size, modification, date, ownership and permissions. You can even combine multiple criteria. Is there a difference between the find command on Linux and the find command on Solaris systems.
Absolutely. There are some differences between the find on Linux and Solara systems, while both versions share the core functionality of searching for files based on various criteria. There are variations in terms of supported options and syntax. Some Linux distributions might include additional features or slight variations in behavior compared to the Solaris version.
While the find command shares a lot of similarities between Linux and Solaris.
There are some key differences that you should be aware of supported options, negativex.
This option tells, find to stay within the same file system. It's generally supported on both Linux and Solaris.
But its behavior might have slight variations. Prune.
Used to avoid descending into specificaries. The syntax and behavior of.
Alright, I think that's good for that one. I don't want to take up too much time. But yeah, I think it's pretty interesting, and.
You know I could see myself if I'm driving down the highway, or doing the dishes or something
And sufficiently.
And there's something I want to know or understand about.
I could see myself kind of.
Using that now, whether it's worth 20 bucks a month, you know, that is a completely different story. So.
But yeah.
Does it search the entire Internet like the A regular
Search engine like, if you want to do history.
Mathematics or chemistry. Things like that.
I know it can search the web. I don't know.
Stuff. If it needs to figure stuff out.
One thing that's really good is about is knowing the contents of Youtube videos.
So if you ask it like what was.
What was this Youtube video about and give it a link? It's very good at that.
Considering the the complexity of the.
Youtube.
Designators for the videos.
Hello!
Would it just pick them out by the name of the topic in the video? Or do you have to give it that 11 character code that Youtube uses.
Oh, I don't know. I I always just give it the link.
I've not really messed with it that much. But yeah, no, it definitely doesn't just search the title. It's definitely.
It definitely sorry. I was just reading the chat. No, definitely.
Knows the contents of the video as well, not just the title and stuff.
But okay.
So.
And you say you give the link you type in that.
Youtube 11, character, identifier thing.
Are.
I usually put the whole link the whole.
What have you? Once you answer that question?
Yeah, right? Yeah, no. I agree. I just, I wanna move on to the next cause. This one is really exciting. So Jim and I live. It's it's kind of a toy, but.
Versus 0.
You can hear me or Sean. Can you hear me, or.
Yeah, I hear you.
You didn't ask that question.
You're not gonna ask that question.
The Gemini.
Gemini.
Yeah.
Ask it about what? Again?
Why does find remove the last page of my novel.
What does that mean? I guess I don't understand the question.
It's actually something in the man. Page.
Oh!
You bring up the fine man, page and and type it novel, you'll see it.
Okay.
Why does find remove the last page of my novel.
The find command is for searching files on your system. So it definitely shouldn't be removing pages from your novel. There's probably something else going on. That's causing the issue.
Can you describe what you mean by removing the last page? Do you get an error message?
When you try to open the file? If so, what does it say?
I guess it doesn't read the main page.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I think if somebody.
Tobin for an Easter egg or something, you know something funny.
Yeah, yeah.
Alright!
So now for the game changer. So, Versal. V. 0, this thing is a game changer. Okay.
Much more than than talking to Gemini.
So before I talk about cell v. 0, there's some people in the audience who might not know what versa.
Is a company. It's a relatively new company, I'd say, in the last 4 or 5 years, maybe. Wow! That could be wrong.
But they they're relatively new.
And they originally were famous for creating next Js, which is a react.
Meta framework.
So.
The way it used to be is react wasn't like a framework. It was just a Ui library.
So oftentimes, if you are building a website, you would use react Js. But then you'd also have a bunch of decisions to make like.
Oh, should I pull and react? Query? Should I use axios? What you know? What other things around react.
Should I use in order to have, like a complete functional application.
And so what next Js did was they made a bunch of decisions about.
What to use, and they did a little bit of work to glue all these things together, and became super popular for doing that, because then you didn't have to make all these decisions every time you wanted to start a new react application right?
And for those of you that don't know what react is. React is basically the default.
When it comes to creating web applications, not web pages, but web applications, probably like for the last. I don't know. 5 years or something. Every company I've worked at.
You have to like.
Give a justification to not use react. That's how popular.
React is.
And so
And so they they
They, they became popular with next, they also hired many of the react core team members away from Facebook.
So they hired many of the rack core team members.
Was put them very influential in the front end web development kind of community.
And they not just the reactor members either. They also hired, like, for example, the main developer behind which is another very popular up and coming.
Ui Framework.
And.
You know, Versal is a little bit controversial. Maybe.
To some people, because they are seen as kind of.
Leading the charge.
To react server components which are kind of a controversial technology.
I'm not gonna go fully into it. But Purcell also runs a cloud hosting platform.
And what's
And if you're running a cloud hosting platform.
You need some kind of server thing to run on your hosting platform.
And so some people think.
That they're pushing react server components just because that will funnel more people into their cloud hosting.
platform.
But some other people think that react server components is just.
The next step forward as far as front end technology and providing a better.
Experience to their users.
And so the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, as it often is.
But V 0 by cell. This is once again copy. So I'm gonna put my.
My!
Anyway. V, 0 is a generative user interface system powered by AI. It generates copy and paste friendly react code based on Chad Cn. And tailwind Css. That people can use in their projects.
Hooray!
Yes, oh, wonderful!
Okay. They also hired. I think they also hired the main. The main person behind Chad Cnn. As well.
So they're they're gobbling up, which is good, right? I think. I think, for the most part.
Versal is seen neutral or favorably by most of the people in the community, right cause. They take these people who create these awesome frameworks and libraries.
And they give them stable jobs, right? That they can keep working on their framework.
They keep the frameworks open source, you know, so I think, generally seen as positive. But there are some detractors out there, of course, as there always will be for a very popular company. I don't have a bunch of slides about 0, because it's 1 of these things where you just gotta see it. This incredible.
You just gotta see it. So.
So this is Versal, B, 0, right here.
And.
The I'm gonna highlight this part of the text right here, hopefully, that's big enough for everybody to see.
But I asked, V, 0.
Create a ui.
List component.
Each item in the list should have a way to edit and delete the data in that row. So that's like 2 sentences there that I wrote.
And it generated all this output on the left. But really what it generated was this. On the right.
And from my 2 sentences it generated.
This thing right here. So, and it's an editable list. If I come in here and I type, you know.
New item and hit. Add it adds it to the list.
If I come in here and I update item and I click the crayon, it updates it. If I.
Delete one, it deletes it. Let me turn this off.
And I looked through this code. I did like a little.
A review of the code that it generates to make this happen.
And it's good.
It's really good.
The, you know, it's either it's somewhere between serviceable and good.
And I'd say more towards the good side.
It's really good.
So the code that it generates is really good, the functionality works. And this was just 2 sentences that I that I told it. Okay.
And but that's not it. I also, you know, I wanted to see how see what it could do. So I said.
Change each row to include 2 columns.
One for the name of the item and the other for the price. So if we click here.
Once again. That's about 2 more sentences that I told it to modify.
The
The thing, and here we go. It did so. Now, if I do once again. Item.
9 9, and I put up and I hit add, it doesn't work, but if I put a price.
Then hit, add.
Then it works.
I can edit. Still, I think let's see.
Item, 78.
And delete, and it all works, and now it has my.
2 columns like I asked for.
Super cool.
Once again. The code is all right here. It's very good, code. I look through it before.
And then I said.
Put a put the list on a card or other background element to make it look more cohesive.
And so it just put it on a card, plain and simple, I think, but it makes it look a lot better, in my opinion.
With a little bit of card around it.
And then.
This is where I told it to change the functionality. So.
I said, remove the edit and delete functionality from each row instead. Put an edit button on the entire list.
Once the list level edit button is pressed, all items in the list can be modified.
And so let's see what it generated here.
Okay. So,
If I click edit.
Then we get this ui right here, where I can go like item 99 and hit save.
Add updates. And I can also still add an item.
Like that.
But we did lose the delete functionality somehow.
So that's that's gone.
But yeah, it did add the it made the edit kind of save.
Functionality here like I asked it to.
Next we come down here.
And I said, Here we go.
Change.
The component, so that now let's skip that one that was not a good prompt for me.
Where there's 1 more that I really want to highlight. Okay.
When in edit mode.
Add a cancel button that will revert any changes. So let's see what it did here. So I really wanted to cancel, because there's no way to.
So now we have a save button and a cancel button. I can put like new item, put $5.
Hit, add.
Change, this.
Change, item, 5.
Save.
There we go. It saved both the price change and the item change.
Also, I can come in here and change this and hit cancel. It cancels out. This code is getting much longer. Now we're up to 150 lines of code.
Still pretty good, I would say. Pretty idiomatic react code here.
Still. Good still. Very good.
And you know, on the left side here I'm scrolling past all this output, but it's describing what all the code does, too. So you can learn like if you're not. If you're someone who doesn't know react.
You can learn by asking it questions about what the code does as you go. But this is just phenomenal, like.
This with the cancel button. And all this this is, you know.
Maybe I'm just slow. But I've been doing this a while, and this is several hours of work.
To get this right here.
What to save and the cancel button using react and stuff, it's at least a couple hours minimum.
To get this, and the fact that I was able to generate it with just a few sentences, and it looks.
Fairly nice using chad cnn.
And the code is good like this is a game changer. So many of my.
So many of my friends are just so excited about how much faster they're gonna be able to do their side projects. Now.
Like, it's just incredible.
And so I wanna make this somewhat interactive. So we did lose the delete functionality at some point.
So I'm gonna see if it'll add that back for us. So add back the ability.
To delete.
An item from the list.
Let's see what it does here.
I think this is gonna be Brisil's most popular product. I think I think co-pilot.
Really needs to step up its game.
After.
Seeing what this can do, I think Github Pilot is really on the back foot. Now I think.
A little bit.
So.
Because this is really cool.
Really cool. And what I'm gonna show next is putting this into a project.
Is co-pilot. The alternative to the react.
I'm not familiar with all this stuff.
Yeah, so co-pilot is an AI.
Coding assistant.
Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah.
Alright. So we have the delete button now, but it looks like we can delete when we're not in edit mode, which is not quite what I want.
Could have been more specific.
Looks like everything else, still works, though.
Okay. So change the delete.
Change, the functionality.
So that the Delete.
Icon is only present and edit mode.
Okay? And then what? After we do this demonstration, then I will show you how to put it into a project.
And then, after we put it into a project.
We can crack, try to create one of the most annoying components to create, and all the front and development.
The data table.
And you think I'm joking. But I'm not. Data. Tables are super annoying. Okay.
Writing that sorting logic, and especially if there's a search bar and all that pagination
So tedious.
But I'm sure I have a strong. I've never tried it, but I have a strong feeling that.
That that this is gonna be able to do it pretty well, but we'll try it together.
So okay. So now, when we go to edit mode, we see our delete.
Love it.
Okay. So what if I delete and then cancel.
Oh, it canceled it. Delete. Item, one cancel. Yeah, see? Look at that. That's so good. Okay.
So.
Now, let's say I have this component super happy with it. Love the fact that it worked, and it was so easy to generate.
I have a Vs code project here.
I mean, I have a react project here.
In my Vs code. And what this is. This is just a very basic.
React project with Chad Cnn.
Already installed. So basically, I spent 20 min this morning.
Following their guide online.
Okay, that's all. I did.
And so now, if I come in here, they have this add to code, base button.
So I'm gonna click that.
I'm gonna copy this command.
Because that's what you're supposed to do with the code. Right? You're supposed to copy commands.
From the Internet.
And yank them right into your terminal right? That's always what you do. Come on.
So I'm gonna do that.
Okay, and we see that it added a few. It added Folder. Here.
And these are the Chad Cnn components, which, if you want, we can get into what Shadn is and why it's so cool.
And then this is the code.
That we were just looking at on the website.
Copy and pasted it right into my project for me.
And so now all I have to do is go to this app Ts file.
And I'll put editable.
List, whatever.
And save that. And I'm gonna run the Dev server. Npm, here.
Gave me a URL.
Boom. There it is in my project.
The Delete icon is really small.
But it should all work. Let's see here.
There we go. Cancel cancel works. If I change a price.
Save save works by delete save works. If I cancel.
If I do all these things at the same time, negative numbers, how does that work.
It works. Okay.
Look.
This is great. This is incredible. Like I, you know.
And maybe you'll impress is amazing.
To me.
So.
Let's go back to.
B, 0.
I can find it.
And let's do something new. Let's do the dreaded.
Data table.
Create.
Create a paginated.
Sort of all.
Data table.
With.
9 s.
Sick 5. Columns.
Let's see what it does.
I'm excited.
Oh, man, I don't! I don't know what that is.
I just saw some weird code that I'm not sure what it is.
Okay, I believe it's finished.
It'd be interesting to have a quick look at that code when it's done.
Yes, we will, we will.
The sorting is not working. So I'm I'm sorting here 1st of all, these.
Sword. Icons are not spaced.
Okay. So the sorting numbers is working.
I believe.
Nope. No, it's not.
That is very disappointing.
Well, it toggles to unsorted right it toggles from sort.
Oh, that's going.
Other way.
And then turning it off. Interesting. I've never seen that before.
That what is happening? I can't tell.
That is what's happening. So we're sorting at lowest.
Then highest, first.st
And then turning it off, turning off the sorting.
I'm not used to that.
Behavior, many times.
What's that?
I've seen that many times.
I'm not familiar with. That's weird. Why would you want that like? Not make it random again? I like the random. Can you make it random for me?
No, it's not necessarily random. It's undoing a sort and going back to what it was previously.
Can you believe this.
Look at this pagination. And it did sample data. I didn't even tell it to do sample data. You know what I mean.
I didn't tell what's the categories were.
I didn't tell what the columns were. I mean.
This is man. This is so good, and it works.
I can't believe this. You know, I've spent days making a generic data tables that could accept any width of data.
Okay. Now, we're gonna add a super.
I didn't know that, did you? Didn't steal it from another website somewhere.
It well, it stole it from Chad's end.
For sure.
And yeah, just I mean, that's what AI is doing right? It's.
Robbing the Internet for content.
Okay, so this.
Oh!
Okay. So I see what this is doing. So this.
Is an array of 3 elements.
And this is indexing into that array a random.
Number between z. 1 and.
0 and 2 or one and 3, probably 0 and 2 for sure.
So this must be creating the mock data. Yeah.
And it's all typescript code, too. So good.
Not Javascript.
Okay, now, let's do a super high feature, so add the ability.
To PIN a row to the top.
The pinned.
Row, should stay.
On the top, regardless.
Of any sorting or pagination. The user does.
It'll never get it. It can't get it. This is an advanced table feature, man. It can't do this.
There's no way.
Haven't tried this yet.
No, no, I literally just did that one thing, and I was just so scared by it and blown away by it.
I only use this all the time, though.
Okay, wait. Let's go down here and PIN number 57.
Okay, we got 57. Look at that dude.
Can you believe that.
Unpenet.
That's PIN number 3.
Can you PIN multiples, or is it like a toggle?
Oh, no, you can only PIN one. No, we need to PIN multiple. Allow.
Multiple rows to be picked.
Okay.
A. After this I'm done. Okay, we I've been long, and I I went way over the half hour that I that I'm trying to stick to. But, man, this is so cool. I hope you guys are getting my enthusiasm coming through. This is just.
So phenomenal. This.
I I am so impressed by this.
And it's awesome.
Consider.
And and.
Princess.
Love react. And this is good.
Considering how bad the zoom.
Speech to text.
Is compared to what your results you're getting. It's amazing.
Still 51.
It must be using a much better.
Speech to text.
Interpreter.
For for the for this. So.
Gem, and I, or whatever it is.
AI!
He's typing this in. He's not talking to it.
Always typing. Okay.
I didn't realize that.
Yeah, Jim and I used he was talking.
You're talking to Gemini. This is.
Okay.
Alright!
So then that makes sense.
You can PIN multiple, and it's sorting the pins.
As well as the the.
Data below separately. You see this.
Like this is price hide for the pins.
And then hide for the non pinned, and then, if I sort it again, it does price. Well, that's unsort. But price.
Low to high for the pens and load a high for the unpaid. Do you see that? That's incredible.
That's awesome.
That's amazing.
Okay, I'm done. But this thing is.
Game changer. I was telling you all this would be exciting, and this is game changing. But anyway, I'm done here. This is V, 0 by bracele.
So cool.
And that's amazing. That is.
Amazing.
I know you can get.
I know you can get Code out of chat. Gpt, but I don't think anything like this.
I know.
Wow!
Gotta stop github co pilot has to step this game up. I'm telling you.
Ever like who is not gonna use react and shad.
Like nobody can compete with that right like.
You have spent hours to do that in angular, you know, or whatever you know like, and then it could just generate it like that, and.
Do good.
It's gonna be a neat tool. Looks really fun to play with and productive. Wow! What a concept.
Okay, well, thank you very much. Sean. Put this together.
A little over a week. I think he was thinking about it before that, though, because obviously it's something that was intriguing. So all right. So we're in the Gui middle of our meeting. I think most of you have been with us before, but just a quick refresher. We do a tutorial, basic tutorial on the front. That's what Sean just did. Then we do a main talk on the back that's still coming up.
And in between. We do the introductions, the announcements and a brief little Q&A.
And that's where we are now that gui middle. So.
With that.
Welcome. This is the St. Louis Unix.
St. Louis Linux Unix. Users group.
Kind of open source of all types and hope. We've been going quite a few years. So by all means take a look at our.
Web homepage. We've got the archive out there. We've got a lot of.
Both recordings, and sometimes the just, the slide deck, or notes from meetings in the past.
And so it's out there and available.
Let's see.
Who are you?
Oh, I'm Gary Meyer. I'm the president of the group right now, and also our Mc. For tonight that other voice you hear friendly face. There in the middle of the screen. That's Stan Ryker stands our Vice President and.
Stan just gets everything done. I mean, he's amazing on every button in this organization and keeps it running. So thank you, Stan.
So.
Welcome as too many buttons, and I'm.
My.
Too many buttons, not fingers.
My fingers are worn to the button up.
No.
That's it. That's it. Our treasure. Lambert's not here tonight. He's usually.
One of the hosts of the meeting.
Our secretary is Ken Johnson. I think he also isn't here right now.
If anyone would care to be the monitor of the chat room tonight, it always helps an extra pair of eyes looking at the chat just in case.
Somebody doesn't have a microphone available and wants to ask the speaker a question or something.
Somebody can monitor the chat and let us know if there's something in there that's a pressing issue.
And in general, not during the meeting, but long-term topic wrangler. If anybody wants to help find new presenters, new topics to talk, we'd love to have your assistance.
It isn't a job that necessarily requires a lot of facetime or online time with us, as much as figuring out who might be a good speaker so, and of course, if anyone would like to speak, we'd love to hear from you.
So, moving on to the next slide.
Click.
Well, maybe not. Moving to the next slide.
8, 8 days from now I see it.
Hey! There we go! 8 days from now, 8 days from now. Next week is the St. Louis Lug Meeting group meeting. It's similar to this meeting, and there's a prepared talk.
And so there'll be a speaker that night.
Sean.
You still with us.
He.
He told us earlier what it was gonna be I can't remember. So I have to play the recording back.
Okay. Also, it'll be on on our.
Of.
Calendar and website, so you can, you can pull it up there.
And.
Let's see.
It's new terminal. This is about new terminal.
5 days after. That is the new log meeting. The new Linux meeting.
Of.
The difference of the new Linux meeting. There is no prepared talks for that meeting. It's.
Nothing.
No, no particular topic for the night. It's basically whoever shows up to the meeting that night and says they're the newest.
User of Linux.
The the least experienced. They get to ask the 1st question.
And everybody else has to try and come up with a good answer to their question.
And so we hope we hope that a lot of our more experienced users are there who can.
Help answer some of those questions.
And of course, any other new users a lot of times, you know. You'll be there to help fine tune, or maybe give that, you know, just a couple weeks ahead of somebody? Answer. That's really helpful.
So. So yeah, that's a good thing to come to. Let's see.
Anything else on that slide.
Dope stand okay.
Yeah,
Yeah.
We need help. Updating our server from Debian to 11.
And still to still need some volunteers and.
Lee is the lead on that, and he's kind of been overwhelmed lately, just like everybody else, is overwhelmed. This is a volunteer organization.
And we.
Use some help on that.
I'd like to mention that the.
Sean 3 House has been working on a new website.
And at some point we're gonna preview that.
And it'd be up to Shawn when we do that.
I'm thinking we're getting real close to switching over to what he's done.
Is there a call for any other announcements tonight?
We'll just.
After this, we're.
Go ahead!
I'm just gonna note real quick. This is 9 11 and a big thanks to all of the 1st responders who.
Helped out on that date, and.
Big, thanks to the.
Passengers on the plane that went down in Shanksville. They decided that they were gonna.
Take matters in their own hands and do their own defense. So they were real heroes that day, too.
Okay.
Please.
Thanks thanks for that, Jerry, that.
Nothing else. Dan.
Thanks for that, Gary. Those were real heroes.
Yeah.
Oh!
Which.
I've showed a lot of these slides earlier. So we're just gonna go right through them.
We talked about the other meetings.
We've got their mailing lists and a calendar.
These are mailing lists.
And the presentation tonight's presentation will be up.
Our site.
And the slug.
And the St. Louis meetings are the ones that are recorded, recorded and posted. We do not record the.
Or well, I do record the the those other meetings, but they're not posted.
They yell.
Linux, New Linux meeting, and the.
Slack, meeting.
Only the.
No! So.
Primary meetings are recorded.
Okay.
Also, any anyone might be recording here.
Yeah, it's true. So you never know when you're being recorded.
Call.
Let's see. So.
Call for help.
Call for help. Certainly at the end of the meeting tonight we traditionally.
Have a, you know, just everybody can just keep asking questions.
Either on topic of tonight or other topics. But right now, if there's anybody who just needs to.
Get in a quick question here before our main speaker. Anybody need to.
Do some quick call for help. Here.
Early in the evening.
Now.
Doesn't have.
Now is your chance.
Going, once.
Twice.
Going, twice.
3 times. Okay. Our main speaker this evening. He's spoken to us.
Of.
Spoken to us, I believe, 3 times before Steve Barelli. Steve comes back to us about every 2 and a half years, or we get him to come back to us about every 2 and a half years.
And so I happen to be speaking with Steve or Texting with Steve whatever about a month ago, and I was talking to him, and and he happened to say, Well, I'd love to come to the meeting this month, but.
The meeting this month is the same time.
That line of Torvalds is doing the keynote address here in Hong Kong, and I'm at the meeting here in Hong Kong, and so.
I'll be listening to lioness rather than you guys tonight. Well, that sounds like something of interest, Stephen. And so Stephen very kindly has decided to fill us in on what I saw in Hong Kong and make some comments about his 2 favorite presentations from the conference there. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Stephen Barelli.
Alright. Thank you.
And I just want to say the presentation before this was great that was super interesting. So thank you for doing that.
Alright, let me share.
And this is, gonna be kind of an interesting presentation for me.
Can you see my screen folks.
Yes, we do.
Alright!
Yeah, so, and I've got the logo. I I showed up earlier and I had the wrong logo on my presentation. So I was able to fix that.
Thank you.
Yep. What we're gonna talk about today is basically kind of like a meta presentation.
And it's gonna be about some of the things that I saw on coupon china and Gary kind of gave the back story about it.
Just a little bit about myself.
I've been around for a while so like my 1st unix, I think I should say that is, we're unix group. Here is next step. So I had a next workstation when I was in college, which is super awesome.
In my career. I was an axman, admin for a very long time.
My 1st Linux.
Was. I remember this was like the I, if the folks remember his used to be able to buy Linux like from these places online where they'd ship you Cds and books right before the Internet was really.
Fast at downloading things.
So that's my 1st so I've.
I've been in the Unix or the Linux Space for a pretty long time. Most of my career.
I currently focus on cloud and kubernetes, especially cloud automation and infrastructure. So.
That's what I've been probably doing since. About the time the doctor came out.
And I currently work for a company that's based out of Seattle. But I work remotely. I'm a solutions architect. And the project I focus mostly on is something called crossplain, which is a way of provisioning.
And this is a project I actually approached, upbound to join them. That, I think, is.
Probably one of the most promising things in the entire infrastructure space.
So that's just a little bit about me.
So as part of that. The origin of this talk is, Gary said. I was speaking. I was accepted with my colleague to go speak at
Open source Limited, Hong Kong you know, which is one of the coupons, and as part of that I didn't even realize that Lionus was speaking there. But, as you know, Gary, you know, I was going to this meeting.
When Gary sent me the invite.
One of the things that was super interesting about being in Hong Kong is, you see, this picture? Here we met some of the maintainers from this language, called Kcl.
Which I also offered sometime in the future. I think it's
At least in the Kubernetes space. We're using it pretty heavily for configuration management and writing.
A lot of the configuration code that we do with cross planes. So it was a really good time for us to coordinate.
Alright something else about this talk. I'm going to be talking about other people's talk, so I think it would be really good if people just chime in because I.
I usually give like technical talks prepared and go through a bunch like an agenda. And here I'm just gonna kind of follow the slides.
And I don't know if that's going to be improvement on actually watching the talks themselves.
Right. They're they're both pretty good speakers.
But the 1st one we're gonna talk about. Oh, this is my talk. Here we're.
We're.
I'll start with the question. So wait a minute, Kcl. I thought. He's loved Yaml.
So, so.
No, this is actually a Kubernetes declarative system, right? So their interface you apply either Jason or Yaml, but they're not opinionated about how you generate that.
So in our case we use Kc. Also the way crossplain works. If some people might be familiar with tools like
You know, ansible or terraform is, you could group resources together right? So.
In cross plane, we could group a bunch of resources together. And when we write that grouping, it's something called a composition.
And we could write that in any language right? Because cross plane has this pipeline.
So we've been using Kl for that.
And then it spits out the yamls, and then the providers take over and provision those so.
There's a lot going on there. If you don't know anything about kubernetes there's a lot of concepts there. But Kubernetes has a very separation of concern type of architecture, right? So each component focuses on doing one thing. And in this case the the Kcl generates the logic for creating those Yaml files.
So it's like, so it's almost like a transpire then, or something like that, right like Kcl to Yaml, or something.
Yes. Yeah.
It's dynamic, though, right? Because, like it runs.
Kubernetes runs controllers. Right? So it's running continually. So it observes all the resources right like. Let's say you have a Kubernetes cluster on. Aws, it will observe all the resources pull in their data.
And then run that data through a pipeline of steps. And those steps could be written in any language. Right? It's a.
It's like github actions. But we've been increasingly leaning towards Kcl. There's things like.
The pick a language queue I know this is kubernetes a little bit more. So it's kind of out of.
What's in this group here? But.
We use go templating, which is kind of like just text templating. You know the brackets. You could use that, too. But.
Increasingly, we've been using Kcl.
So it's A very well run project.
So, yeah, the cross plate thing is a huge.
It's it's a big thing in its own.
So we're gonna talk about 2 today. The 1st one is by Greg Crowman, and he's gonna talk about the security process which I thought was super interesting, and I hope this is.
Useful for everyone and.
I kind of put links to the presentation and video here so that you could go follow it later. I think.
This is a pretty good talk, especially the 1st half of it. Just talking about the process of Linux, right? How Linux is released.
What their philosophy is. And it, I think it helps inform a lot of other things in the software industry, as Linux is really one of the signature software projects.
I would say, almost of all time. It it's probably one of the biggest.
You know whether it's private or public. It's probably one of the most well run projects.
So let's talk about it. And I'm just gonna kind of paraphrase here what he's talked about.
But Linux is massive, right? Like it's 85.
It's 38 million lines.
And but what's really interesting here is the vast majority of that is device drivers.
So what most people use is a tiny fraction.
And what was really interesting here is that.
The complexity actually almost feels backwards, right? Like the servers are actually using the least amount of code.
And it's things like phones that end up using the most.
Right? Because I think the example here was that the open source android drivers has, like 300 different drivers that need to be built in.
So this is kind of surprising, because we tend to think of like servers as being the most.
You know, powerful devices they are, but they tend to be much more limited in terms of what gets shipped and attached to them.
I think the drivers is also like the main lock in thing, too, right? Like you don't hear anybody else talking about making a new kernel right like.
You know, if you think about the Linux ecosystem.
Like, especially like on the desktop side, right? There's so much.
Competition and choice, Katie and Gome, you know. It's like an example, you know.
But the kernel. There's none of that. There's just Linux, right? And that's because.
Nobody wants to start at 0 drivers and then go all the way up to 30 million.
Yeah.
Yeah. It. The scope.
Free Px camps would.
Make exception of that, as well as the.
Lines of driver code, right.
Solaris, aluminums.
Yeah, it's it's hard. I think it's very hard to compete with onex. Well, you know, just the sheer scope and velocity of the project is kind of amazing, actually.
Yeah, well, that's what I wanted to talk about at this year. Scope of it is really impressive.
So this is what he's talking about, too. They do 9 changes an hour. They average.
Which is a really high velocity. And this is where things really start. Get interesting.
You know, when I started with Linux many years ago, I said about, you know, I started with Red Hat 2, and I know if folks were around for those early days. Sometimes there was like big delays between kernels, you know, like there could be a year or 2.
You know, waiting for like 2 and 2.4.
They change that a while ago, and now they're on a very cycle. You know, it's basically every 9 weeks they ship a new stable kernel.
Which is different than in the past when they would sometimes, you know iterate between, you know, test kernels and stable.
An important thing about Linux is that.
Going forward. The version numbers don't really mean anything. It's usually when they get up to about 20 or so, like 6, 20.
They just up the 1st number.
So it's not like you know, in computing, we could oftentimes be very conservative with the 1st number, right? Like we only change it. If there's a breaking.
Api change that tends to be the convention.
For a lot of projects.
You know it here at.
Linux. They don't really consider that they'll just, you know, whenever it's convenient for them, they'll just.
Increase the number, so.
We'll probably, you know, couple years away from 7 O.
Another big thing is that they have this promise that they're not gonna break user space. And then they add on purpose. Right? So this has been their promise since. Like.
For the last 17 years.
So this is all really important, because some of these are like, not conventional for other projects.
You know there are projects that don't mind breaking, you know, downstream.
And then there's also, you know, this concept of having all stable releases, which is a big change from one how Linux started when they used to have like test and development kernels.
Question.
Yes.
You mentioned that they're trying to break user space.
And maybe it's the user space versus Colonel Space problem. My understanding is, there was.
Actually a little bit.
Of hostility towards Zfs.
And changing some things in Colonel that.
Broke zfs, and that was done on purpose.
Understand it.
I don't have any context on that. I don't know. Does anyone else? That's a really interesting.
Could you repeat that? I don't know if I totally understood.
What the.
Hi.
Thought? Was there.
Fair enough. I may be wrong.
But my understanding is. There was a change made in the kernel.
On purpose, with full knowledge.
That it would break.
Some aspect.
Of zfs.
As in everybody that was using Zfs on Linux. It was a.
Don't go past this kernel version.
And don't go past this version of the Zf.
Utilities and libraries.
Something massively changed.
In the kernel, and it took a lot of effort.
To get.
Past it.
And I it.
Teetered on licensing.
And it was for zfs almost like.
Years ago we had the.
Untainted versus tainted when you loaded.
External drivers.
Or modules. It was something.
On, that.
Level. I believe.
And it.
Se seems to me like it was diametrically opposed to the.
Trying to not break user land. This was one of the few things I've heard of.
Then it's Nope.
We're breaking it. We know we're breaking it.
We're going full speed ahead, breaking it.
Tough Cookies.
We'll see if I can find some more on.
Yeah, that's super interesting.
But it zfs on Linux.
There's a lot of interesting things around licensing and.
It could have been embroiled in that, and the back end might be.
Trying to protect the kernel.
From a legal licensing standpoint, and expelling something they thought.
Was.
Potentially dangerous.
Yeah, I did see a quote from Linus about 2 years ago, where he said he was telling people don't use.
And he won't accept an easy Fs stuff in the kernel because of the licensing.
And how litigious.
He, he specifically cited how litigious oracle is.
Java, you know.
So.
Going through the the way the kernel is developed.
Is really interesting, too, because they have 2 different tracks that run in parallel. So.
Whenever they open up a release window for the next release. Like for 6, 11.
Usually the patches have to be ready right like, if they're not available.
When the merge window is open. They're just gonna have to wait for the next release cycle, which I think is really interesting.
If you worked in a software a while sometimes you know that like.
There's always pressure to delay things for the next release. In this case, because they're time based. And this is something I actually really like, I've seen it.
You know, when you get to a time base sometimes.
It's not as bad to miss certain patches, and so they do 2 things, so they have one. They have a merge window opens for the next release. And you could see here. These are the Rc releases. And they do those roughly once a week. Before they get to 6 11. So there's gonna be like 8 or 9 of those versions.
And, as I said before, all those new patches have to get in.
At the beginning of the merge window.
Then on the other side, they do.
Stable releases right? And they do patch releases on those, and those are also one to 2 a week. And you see that.
They tend to increase, especially on older kernels, they can increase into the hundreds of releases right? So.
And then, after 9 weeks, another like the 6 11 will be cut, and they'll start the process alone.
Again.
Which is question, which of those are the are the merge windows that you're talking about? I don't follow.
Yes.
You see you see the you see the blue dots there, the the merge for 6, 11. So as soon as so if you start at 6 10. And you say, we're gonna start the 6 11 process.
As soon as you open up that merge window. Linus says that all patches have to be ready to go.
Right like, if they're not ready to go when the window opens. They're gonna have to wait for the next release.
So it's you can't come in halfway through and say, I want to bring a new feature in. It has to be there at the beginning of the cycle.
Okay.
And it's a 9 week cycle, right? So you know, 2 months or so you're going to have to wait for the next.
To get it into shape.
On the other side. The green ones are the stable releases, which are released pretty much once a week, and those just have bug fixes in them.
Okay.
Oh, I was reading it upside down. No wonder I couldn't follow.
It's going down.
Just.
Yes.
Thank you.
I.
So rules for stable, because obviously, we talked about the the windows for the development kernels. But stable is something different. And I put what's here? There's a huge amount of documentation on the kernel org, and I have to say, as someone who's been.
And cloud computing for a long time. I haven't focused on Linux a lot. The last time I really focused on kernel numbers was around the time of Docker when we were merging in different file systems, like, you know, overlay Fs and things like that.
Since then I've kind of it's become a little more abstracted out to me.
So what they're saying here is that, you know, fixes those stable releases that come out that can't be bigger than a hundred lines, and it can't really modify too much behavior.
Right. It either fixes a bug or just adds a device. Id.
That's it. Anything else probably needs to go into the next release.
There's also long term kernels.
Right? So this is something that the Linux community has been releasing longer term kernels, because obviously the other kernels only last for 9 weeks. Right? They last for 2 months. So usually. What they do is they wait to the end of the year, like the last kernel release of the year will be a long term. Release and I put the list here, and one thing you could see here is that.
They've got a 4 dot, 19, you know, 5, 4, 5, 10, and you could see the number of intermitt releases that they've done those stable releases with less than a hundred lines of patch code. You know all those little patches that they put in it gets up to 200, right? Like. So they release a lot of stable versions. One thing that's really amazing about the Linux project is just.
How much software they can release.
And ship.
You're looking at hundreds of versions a month, you know, across 5 or 6 different kernel lines.
It.
It's really, it's really impressive.
This Lts is is this, what a lot of the distros.
Base, their long term, support.
But.
Intentions on.
Based on this.
Kernel, release.
They do. But this is changing right? Because this is, that's an excellent question, because the Linux community, especially the developers, are.
Encouraging people to go more on a rolling basis.
Just to keep up with them.
Like it used to be that like you'd get a redhead 5, and it would have a fixed kernel, and then Red Hat would spend the next 5 years patching it.
What they want to do is have.
Just people keep up with the kernels.
Right? So what they're doing is it's something a little different. They're just frequently stable kernels.
And they're all compatible with each other. They're hoping to have that compatibility guarantee. So they just are encouraging people to keep up with them.
Because the big thing of this is that Greg, who is one of the security maintainers of the previous branches, is that they're cutting long support.
Right. So they just last September. It used to be that they would cover long-term.
Last September they cut it down to 2 years.
And the big reason for that was one. A lot of people are not using the older kernels. Another reason it takes very senior engineers to maintain those older kernels.
Just because they're so different from what's today like knowing what to put into them.
So, yeah.
And you could see here just the number of changes a day. The older kernels don't get as many patches.
So what's going to happen is here. It's they're really gonna start. These older kernels are gonna start falling off.
In terms of support. And you're basically gonna have about 2 or 3 years that you get out of a kernel.
A as I understand it, the the Debian.
Maintainers.
They do security up to like 2 years, and then.
Those are the main people that that are working on the Debian current.
Distribution.
And then for the next 4 years they have a whole different set of people that are.
Are coming in and dealing with the security issues.
Is is that what's going on.
Am I correct in that.
Yeah, I'm I'm not sure how Debian runs. Are there any other Debian folks here.
Hey!
I've.
Find your comment about the
2 years.
Long Term, Colonel support.
A somewhat.
Odd.
Or their choice of it, as in that.
Most servers that I've been around.
When they're deployed.
They particularly.
Well, I'm not sure exactly. If it's 2 years it might be longer.
No, I'm.
Okay.
Referring to.
That cut off all right.
Yeah.
But.
Oh, I've seen a lot of servers.
That when it's deployed, it's basically on a given kernel version.
Minus patches, but stays with the main kernel version.
Now they may deprecate a kernel version.
Before the hardware is retired.
Yeah, the the Linux people. That's why they're doing all these releases. They're they're moving towards. Just keep up right? Like it's not.
I think a lot of folks who are maintaining servers in the past like things were a lot more fixed, and we patched them.
Now they're pushing more and more, just to keep up with.
The head.
And I got the site here this end of life, date and.
I thought it was really interesting. They actually have a graph of all the different support for the different Linux kernels.
So you can see here. This ends when the when the colonels.
This is just the the main kernels. Obviously not. Whatever Debian or red hat has within their kernels.
Right.
But yeah.
But I think red hat or.
Pick your sue, or whoever.
Gonna be a little bit harder press to continue supporting and.
A given kernel after the kernel maintainers have stopped supporting that kernel.
So just yeah, just something to keep in mind.
Could. Could you repeat the name of that site? I'll type it in the chat.
It's let me see if I can copy it. Let me.
Not here. Yeah, let me escape, because it's my.
Where's my chat? You know it's zoom right like it's a where did it put my little chat window.
Somewhere. Here we go.
I see it.
Alright! There we go!
I just posted the whole thing. But we'll okay.
Yeah, so this is interesting things like that. I changed since I had been really involved with like looking at what's happening in the Linux world.
So.
That's kind of the release process. And just yeah, just going back in summary, that just thinking about. You know how Linux is changing right. They're getting to pretty much a well oiled machine that is like shipping constantly.
And I think their expectations are that people are just gonna keep up.
And so it might be different way of thinking as things go in the future. You know, a lot of workloads now are cloud-based.
They're immutable right?
There. You know their their devices, you know. There's.
At least on the cloud side or the compute side, and then, when we
We'll talk about this in a little bit. But the vast majority of Linux devices are actually embedded in handheld.
And that's a whole other problem.
One thing that's if you're not aware of this in the Linux community. They don't like to separate out security issues from other bugs.
Right. They they think.
This is and when we talk about keynote he's gonna say the same thing.
They consider bugs just bugs like, if there's a security issue, they don't want to treat it differently than anything else, and the Linux community is actually very aggressive about some of the things.
That are normal, the security industry, and like, in terms of how long for notification. And things like that? The Linux community generally doesn't play games with that.
So. Just so, you know, if you're in the Linux world.
Any security issues just can be classified as any other bug.
And they'll go resolve it.
Alright!
But hardware is treated differently right like it's
In Linux, like the software bugs like. So
I don't know if I have the slide here.
So.
The way Linux works with software bugs is so that they have a kernel security team. So this is all stuff that has been
Getting built up over the years, and I'll talk about some stuff that just happened this year.
But there's a Colonel security team that's.
Basically reactive. Now within Linux. And their job is to basically triage all the bugs that are coming in and decide how to, you know. Give those out to each of the Maintainers. Something really important about here is that there's no early announcements.
That might. Other projects may have like for people who are insiders. And the second thing, too, is that there's only a 7 day embargo on software bugs. Once they resolve it.
So sometimes, you know, companies will want to have a Pr release or something like that. Once when an issue is fixed and they want to delay the fix. The Linux community doesn't play that game. They basically say, once we fix something
You know you can hold on to it for 7 days, and then you have to talk about it.
So.
So, yeah, the other thing is hardware security issues. Some of our favorite chip companies have had some hardware issues in the past.
And so those have actually taken years like. One thing Linus had talked about in his is that they had the knowledge for years about some of these hardware bugs, and they couldn't talk about it.
So hardware is different because it takes a long time to get those fixed. They do have like a special encrypted email list for hardware issues, because it's such a security concern.
Yeah. And a lot of the biggest companies are like on this secret list or this encrypted list.
So, and, as I said before, I'll share these, I'll upload these slides. And but there's a link here. There's actually great documentation on the Linux site. About some of this.
This is the big change that happened this year.
So Linux is now a cbee numbering authority. What that means is like. Whenever you see a vulnerability, you'll see something like, you know 22 0, 4, 16 0, 1, or something like that.
And in the past
People were assigning these to Linux like they'd find the bucket, and then they'd assign it to the project.
And it's very hard to manage. And there are also some vendors who are doing some shady things.
About like creating cbe so that they could get fixes into the kernel.
Like red hat.
So.
And a big driver. For this, too, is that there's E regulations coming in that like open source projects need to own their own security.
So just this year, you know, Greg, who's giving this presentation.
Started like he took over it. So Linux now is issuing their own Cve, so nobody else can issue a Cve against Linux. The project is doing it itself.
And of course the talk is like, you know, they're generating 60 a week. Right? So I think.
We're starting to see how the picture works here. Right? Linux is a super high velocity project.
And they're controlling now all their cbee generation.
So.
What is a cbee? So it's a common vulnerability and exposure. And there are ways, security, vulnerabilities.
And it's pretty broadly defined. So this is from Greg's. You know, anything that can cause a crash or a buffer overflow, or logic, errors, or lots of things like that. Anything that they determine.
And this is actually in the Cve right? So they explained, what could be a vulnerability. And then what happens is the Linux Security team will get a bug report in and they'll triage it one for the Maintainer and 2. Whether it needs to be classified. You know a Cve needs to be generated for it.
Obviously they're not gonna classified as a security bug because they don't do that. They'll just be a bug with a Cv on it.
But yeah, one thing here they're talking about like a lot of things that are triggering cpees. Right now are these Pentagon.
So.
Basically, this is embedded on billions of devices. So if they run across one of these, they have to open up a Cve.
But yeah.
Anyway.
This is like one example he made of one of the things that's causing a lot of those 60.
A week.
Alright
This is one of the things that's really good is that you can search like all the Linux Cds.
When they publish it, they're gonna say and that, you know, when they fix the issue and report what it does.
They're gonna say, what versions and what files are updated. And I I look, there's multiple search engines. I went to the Us. Nationalist.
And I was able to just like, do a quick search on Linux and see what's affected.
So yeah, you could look there. And, as I said, as you said before, very few are applicable to the average user, right? Like outside of the core kernel, which is a small percentage. The vast majority of these are being on the drivers.
Alright!
So this is the last slide. Here. Greg, put this in the slide, so I had to put his name over here right because I. It's not me saying this quote, it's Greg, right. And then, when I thought of this, I was like, Oh, I should just put the thing in from the office here, because it's like the exact same thing. So.
But this here his last message here is really like what he's saying, right like you have. They're pushing everybody to use.
The latest is stable and long-term kernels.
Right? So getting back to that
I think they're trying to discourage.
Patched kernels that are out there, that people are like patching. They just want you to fix the, you know.
Stay on upstream and help get things merged and upstream.
So.
With that, because.
You know.
If it's.
In the Linux kernel, but a problem for another architecture that I'm running.
It doesn't affect me.
Even though I'm not.
At the latest and greatest.
So.
Yeah, they move very fast. And
Yeah. So that was, it was a really good talk. He gets more into the security thing that I didn't think was applicable. But just. I just thought his talk was just like a really good overview of the Linux release process. How things work.
So I thought, it's pretty valuable.
The next thing is we're gonna talk about is minus so.
He actually gave a keynote here. I was pretty excited. I did not know when I went to the conference that he was going to be there, so it was pretty exciting.
And he basically did like a QA session. And this will be a little harder because.
Latest. He doesn't really do a presentation. He does more of a Qa.
So I did put a link here for it. It's about 30 min, and it's great. I think.
I honestly think I don't know if I'm gonna do justice to it, because I actually think if you could come across these 2 doing a presentation. It's pretty entertaining if you're into this stuff, and it's super informative all the time. So I don't know if it's actually just valuable for me actually to talk about it versus everybody just going off and seeing it themselves.
But we're going to do the former. So.
So this was really interesting. Let me get to the next slide.
Hope.
Let me just left that I'm not. Gonna I have a slide here in my so hopefully a load. If I upload the presentation.
So really the thing about this? Why, they do this format, and they do this all the time. They seem to go all over.
Is that like is head of open source at Verizon. And obviously we know who Linus is. And they work together as a team. So you'll see them actually doing this presentation.
Several times around. It's not the same presentation every time Linux.
8 public speaking here. He he doesn't. Well, he hates, prepare, and giving a talk. What he really enjoys is that doing these QA. Sessions. He doesn't know the questions in advance. Right? So Dirk.
You know, creates all the questions you know, based on what he thinks is interesting. And then they just basically have a conversation for half an hour. So it's it's usually pretty entertaining. And you get a lot of interesting information about it.
The 1st thing they were talking about was, we're.
A 3rd of a century into Linux. Right? So.
You know, for folks who are.
You know, not familiar with the origins of it, you know it's 1,991 that he started working on it like in April, and by August.
Which is just a couple of weeks ago, 33 years ago.
He released the 1st version of it. Right? So he's been working on it.
And so yeah, his comment here was, it's almost done like, he said. It's almost.
He started then, saying, It's almost ready, and now he's like it's almost ready still. So.
That was his comment about this.
It was.
Really interesting and.
How, I guess, for this crowd here, how many people have been using Linux for a very long time, and how many people are like new to it!
From the name. So I'm familiar with, it's a 95% of the people. It's maybe 2 people here. I haven't seen their name before.
But everybody else here has used in some form or another.
Yeah, for you, I'm saying like, for years or for recently or.
Hmm.
Oh, for me, for it's over 20 years.
Wow!
Very cool.
Yeah.
I think for me. It's probably over 20 years, and.
I. I loaded it as my main driver in 1995.
Wow!
That's it. Yeah, very nice.
I. When I 1st saw it, I.
Coming from the windows world, and I looked at it, and Dos had about 60 commands or 90, or I forget whatever.
And I 1st looked@thatfirstst
Bit of Linux. It's had more than 350 commands. And I I was like a.
A pig in mud. I just thought it was great.
And I thought to myself, if they never improve it.
They never improve it at all, I would still be happy.
And that was.
Way back, then.
Yeah.
Stan. I don't know if the visual image you just gave us is really gonna help.
The promotion of Linux. But thank you.
Pig and mud.
Well, you know, you know.
So.
I grew up on a farm, and you know pigs were happy in the mud, and they really were.
Okay.
You know.
Anyway, back to you, Stephen.
Yes.
Yeah. The next thing is, they started talking about the next release, like we talked about, if you remember, with the Greg talk like that we were in the 6 11.
Right release cycle. So I guess they're probably getting close enough. It's been a few weeks. It's talk.
So you'll probably see 6, 11 coming out soon.
But what's really interesting here is that, you know, because of like
A lot of the AI workloads that are now coming onto Linux. They've been actually spending a lot of time going back into memory things. So he felt like, after you know, 2030 years is still surprising that they're still doing things that the core concepts
And you know that's kind of, and let me see if I have. The next one of the things here is. I thought this might actually be an interesting talk for the group at some point.
There's this thing that they're trying to get in 6, 11. It's been going back and forth for a while, and it's an extend, you know, it's a scheduler in user land that you could go implement your own schedulers.
Using. Bpf.
And user space.
And there was some tragedy and one of developers. So it wasn't going to be included.
But then now they're looking to include it in 6 12. But I link to actually a talk here about a presentation about it.
It's probably outside of my, what realm of experience. But I think it'd be interesting for future talk, somebody just to look into this, because there's a lot of excitement about this about, especially people who are like hyper scaling and looking at different ways to.
You know, change because Bpf is really kind of changing the cords itself and making it more programmable. So like you could see the kernel, eventually becoming like.
An engine for running Bpf programs or something like that. So.
I thought this would be interesting for folks like, just take a look at this presentation. It just came out in June.
See where it is. Here.
The pluggable event Scheduler, and there's like a Pdf. And everything to it. I think they're working on a Meta Facebook.
So.
That's crazy, cause I thought I thought you couldn't have 4 loops, because, you know, you can't just run any code inside the current loop or.
Yeah.
Or you know something else, so I didn't think you could do 4 loops inside, so.
I guess that's not true anymore, because I can't imagine you can do a scheduler without a single for loop.
I don't. I honestly do not
That's the Bpf, we're going into here. X, run a Bpf, Gpl.
Yeah, you just.
Yeah. So I don't see.
Load balancing. Yeah, they don't say anything about like.
Maybe just schedulers, maybe just for the.
Oh, I see. So they probably do anything that needs like looping and user space. And then they only call the Ebf to do.
Certain tasks that don't need that stuff.
Yeah.
So, yeah, so that makes sense. Right? Like, the looping would be in the user space. And then you could have a custom.
So, yeah, this was a big feature that people have been.
Asking for. So it's looking now like the 6 12. So this came up as a point of discussion. So yeah, I think this would be actually an interesting topic. Just Bpf in general is.
You know they're using it in the Kubernetes world, and you know some of the side Carless, you know, service meshes and things like that.
They talked about the future. And I think this is something that's really interesting about Linus. I think what.
Probably makes them very successful as a kernel maintainer.
Is that he doesn't really look too far ahead like he doesn't. He's not a big vision kind of person, right like he's very much.
In the weeds, getting the details right? Making sure things run correctly. So they basically look one to 2 releases ahead.
You know, and a big thing about that is like he's talking about here like it's been 20 years for the Linux project, and they're hoping.
This year they're gonna get the the main patches in.
Right? So this is a project that's been running on the side for 20 years. And he talked about like kernel development, actually, like a huge amount of development takes place.
Outside the kernel in parallel, and then when they get those windows open, it comes in, and it seems like it's very quick. But there's a long incubation process, often outside the mainline kernel.
But yeah, just like the kernel team itself, like they're only focusing one or 2 releases ahead at any time.
You know I've heard the Fedora talk about that, too. It's like this is all open source volunteer work. I can't possibly give you.
A timeframe, for when something will be done, because.
You know, it's like.
On their own time. I realized the kernel is like, you know, much more professional than that. You know. We have Intel, and people like that that are getting paid to work on the kernel. But.
You know what if I mean? That's completely outside of Linus's control, though. So like looking far ahead, like, Oh, yeah, in 10 years, we're gonna have this or that.
Assuming.
These people still decide to spend their free time on it, and they'll just like Buy a Mac or something, you know, like.
Yeah, I think the best majority of developers now are being paid by these companies because it's.
It's a pretty rigid schedule like it's it's not something you just drop in and drop a patch in, or something like that. It's like you have to have it ready, and at the opening of a window to make sure it's you know, all the correct.
Everything's correct about it. So.
Yeah, it's not a trivial thing.
The last numbers. I saw that the about.
80% of the kernel developers were being paid.
By corporations.
And that was just like 4 or 5 years ago.
It. It's it's you really.
Probably gone up.
Yeah, you really need consistent, because a huge amount is just maintenance, right? Which is not glamorous work, right? Like it's, you know, looking at bug reports, reproducing it, documenting.
So it really requires consistent investment over long periods of time.
Who they're not being paid by is the Linux Foundation.
I don't know if you all saw that recently, but, like apparently the Linux Foundation only spends 2% of its budget on the Linux kernel.
Which I was just amazed.
Well, they're like a big business, right? They run all these huge conferences like the coupons, which are 10,000 people. The Linux Cons Open Source Summit.
That's incredible.
Which is a good conference to go to if you've never gone to it.
If you're like, into Linux. But yeah, it's they run a lot of events training. So they're multi-million dollar organization.
In in many ways, the Linux. It's.
You know, it's almost like a vendor organization, too, right? Like putting a stamp of approval on things.
Alright!
The next thing I know this is a lot of text here. So, but this is kind of what he's talking about. The release process.
So, as I said, they do, basically a roughly 9 week.
Release cycle, which means one year they'll have 5 releases. The next year they'll have 6.
And, as I mentioned before, the major version, about every 20, Linus says, whenever he runs out of toes and fingers, that's when he decides to update the version.
And really, for the folks who've been here we have some folks who've been with Linux a long time, who remember the old days when it was like a year or 2 between kernels.
When it 1st started. There was like, you know, they tried to do a colonel a year once it started getting really big, like in the 2 point x.
And anybody knows software is like when you wait for software to have certain features, then it could drag out right. You keep delaying the release.
So.
He initially tried to release every 6 weeks, and then they've back to 9 weeks, and they've been doing that for about 17 to 20 years.
Right. This process that I got that I documented in Greg's.
Presentation, where you know they have.
Open up the window. All the patches come into Linus's main line, and then they do release candidates for the next 9 weeks, and then release.
They've been doing that for a long time now, and they're very good at it. So.
It's like a machine right now, and I don't think it's gonna change.
Did anybody get any of these talks? Go into the fact that, like Linux doesn't use Kit like they don't use get as part of their process.
That's what I heard. Is that like.
Even though Linus created, he doesn't use it on the current office, which I.
I find fascinating.
I'm pretty sure they do. What would they use?
I think they just email patches.
Don't they patch Series.
We could take a look at that after this talk, because I have some links to the release so we could take a look.
I thought that.
Linux kernel was based on.
Get for version control and transporting patches back and forth.
That is entirely different than the version control system.
There are ways to.
Make that happen.
Okay. So they use get for everything. So they okay, so they use get on their machine. And then they have get generate a Patch series and email it or something.
That would be my assumption.
Gotcha.
This was a talk that came up like it was, basically, you know, this year Linux is.
Taken over the Linux project has taken over cves.
And and something important here is that, you know. Again they dress bugs really quickly, but they don't want to.
Prioritize like the security features, or have to wait on, like, you know, making notifications and things like that.
You know, big drive of Linux is to support more hardware all the time, so they're constantly releasing new kernels.
And obviously it was becoming super painful to have outside organizations like creating cves against Linux.
So they've taken it all in house now, with, you know, Greg leading the charge, and the Maintainer is getting, you know, after triage.
So, yeah.
Yeah, we. So this is actually interesting that these 2 talks kind of reflected on each other. Linus is talking after Greg's.
His was the day before.
But Linux.
They fix bugs very quickly and.
You know. That's what he said. Here, that's that's why they do a 7 day like they're not gonna do a 90 day embargo on announcing a fix.
Right, or they had one that extended the 400 days.
It's basically, that's why. Again, you see, this kind of rigidity in the Linux.
And it's not really rigid. It's just that they they stick to their standards and that they're not gonna let.
Outside influences. Delay them right? Like it's like they're shipping on a code. They're fixing code. You get a certain amount of time, and then you move on.
And of course we talked about here.
You know, hardware. Obviously, you know the other side of it. He also mentioned that.
You know, when you have, like processor bugs that you know are very deep into the process, or it takes a long time to get it addressed especially, you know, there could be national security implications and things like that. So.
Alright!
So this is a question folks were asking about.
Lts versus like being just unstable.
Right and.
So? Dirk asked. You know what's going on there? Right? What's the best thing to do?
Old kernel back ports or new kernel, and.
I think they're kind of what he said. Here is like companies that stay back end up paying for it.
That.
You know, it's it may seem like it's better in the short term, but in the long term it's a lot more work to, you know, just to jump and keep up with the newest versions as Linux is moving pretty quickly, so for the folks who are asking about that, I think this is why I feel.
That they're gonna start more and more, just moving to like rolling.
You know that you're gonna be at most, you know, within a year. So we're a couple of months of the newest kernel across the board.
I see conflicts with.
Think that with things like Pci.
And other certifications of systems.
You've got people installing an application called Big.
Oracle database, or something on.
Whatever, and it's got certain.
Version. Constraints like it's certified for a certain version of something.
Maybe say, it's.
5 point.
Whatever.
You may be able to roll forward in the 5 series.
But I think you're gonna start seeing problems rolling.
Your kernel to another major version.
At least with the current support model for some big applications.
Yeah.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. I mean, obviously, you've seen up to now like the.
The the Linux kernel team. They just like to rock and roll. They'll just keep shipping and.
So it would be interesting to see how this all shakes out. The the new policy was just announced last year. So the older kernels are still in support.
But they're gonna start dropping off here in the next couple years.
Yeah, I think that coincides with, I think the the news about the Colonel Lts like cutting back, and the news that the Linux foundation only spends 2% of its budget on Linux. I think those like came to my attention at the same time. Right? So it's like.
We can't support our kernels longer, because that's too hard and expensive.
But we have a Linux Foundation who spends like barely no money on the Linux kernel.
So couldn't we just get them to like increase it to 5, or maybe 10% of their budget? And then we could have.
These long term supports. Like I, you know.
Book.
That's I don't know. That's I just.
Allocation of resources there, for something called the Linux Foundation might be a bit skewed, but you know it's just my opinion.
It's not really based on much.
Well, it's you know, it's funded a lot by the different vendors, right? So the vendors probably are fine with short, and I'll say this. This is happening with us, too, right, like open source, is moving to shorter and shorter support windows, because.
If you want the long term support, you're gonna have to pay for it.
Right. That's you know. It's expensive to do so.
That's gonna be a trend. I think we're gonna see across our industry.
You know, the people who care about remaining on older kernels are usually the people like the governments and large corporations who can afford.
You know.
Support contracts. You know that.
Are in the millions of dollars.
That's true, and like how you started the started to talk off. But there's so many abstractions now between.
The kernel, and whatever.
Whatever you're running, which in one hand is like fine upgrade the kernel. It doesn't really affect me.
On, my, you know, deploying apps on.
Eks.
But then.
You know it kind of does, because now everything in that stack is moving so fast like.
I feel like I have to upgrade my eks on Amazon like every I don't know. 3 months they're like.
And if you don't upgrade, they like start charging you 6 times more than your original cost. And so.
Like, okay. So the kernel is moving faster. But so is everything on top of it. And I'm having to like keep turning them all now, like, you know. So it does get a little bit.
Poo tiresome.
Yeah, that the ax box that hasn't been upgraded in like 6 years sounds really good.
I'm just saying.
And plus, and you know, and also.
I don't know if this is true for every company, but I've seen a lot of companies where.
They know exactly what version of stuff you're on in the cloud, right? They have that all like monitored and closely watched. But meanwhile you're running reli on, Prem, and nobody even knows about it. So they don't hit you up on that. So of course, the company I'm working for now. Never do something like that. But the ones before, you know.
Yeah.
Hey! Steven.
Yes.
I have a question.
So how has Ibm's closed door policy.
With red hat and all their development code.
Affected what's going on in the
Kernel itself.
I don't know. I mean, are we? Do we have any? I I personally like. As I said before, I consume Linux kernels, usually via immutable operating systems.
So like, you know whether it's eks or kind, or something like that. It's.
You know it's the the cloud vendor packages it up for me nowadays.
You know, or I have.
You know Google Linux instance, that I use for development. So I'm not really sure what has changed in the Ibm day. So what Red Hat is doing.
Yeah. Cause. What I understood was that.
Ibm after acquiring red hat decided.
Cause it was making a lot of
A lot of input to the kernel.
And evidently Ibm decided to.
Not release it.
And I don't know if that has changed.
Since I had learned that.
So that's reason why I'm asking is how
Is Ibm affecting the code.
Yeah, let's do we have any Red Hat enterprise folks.
One thing Greg said. He said that
80% of all Linux kernels are like Debian or Ubuntu, or Alpine.
Is a very small percentage that's actually running.
Like a red hat.
Wow!
Yeah.
That.
Seems like it's very different from the old days.
Yeah.
Say that again.
He said, from cloud vendors that, like just these are on vms, or something, but like something like.
80% of instances are just running an open source distribution like Debbie and Urb.
That doesn't surprise me, because.
Red hat and licensing.
For it.
Really, alters.
Where it's used.
It'd be interesting to see similar numbers with Sue's.
Support it.
Because I mean, look at all your raspberry pies and all the people running.
Minimum version,
Vps is for things.
And.
They're not like.
How many on this call are paying for a license.
For red hat or sous.
I'd be willing to bet most of us are running free.
Right.
At home or at work, cause it's a different answer at home. Of course I'm not gonna pay, but it worked.
Yeah, a, a.
Try!
I'll be back and.
And just in general, like deployment patterns in the enterprise are changing right like. So for Red Hat.
They're having a lot of customers be on open shift.
Right or in the cloud. You're having a lot of people either running in Lambdas or Fargate, or Eks right like. So.
The virtual machine workloads are being more abstracted out right like a you know, you're just gonna get an auto scaling group.
That's disposable.
So even Linux itself, the kind of workloads you see in the enterprise are changing.
See here!
This was interesting. They talked about it because they're in China, and China obviously produces an enormous amount of devices.
And basically, it was like, you know, get off those.
So
And I think it's 4 dot 19 before point 9 here. But I think they said 4.19. It wasn't clear from the Transcript.
And then.
This was an interesting thing. Here, too. It was about rust in the kernel. I don't know if there's anybody here who's about rust, but.
There's a big push to start getting it included in the kernel. It's gone a little slower than they expected.
They said, with the 6 10 release was the 1st time that the upstream compiler could be used before they had to have like special checks.
And the other thing, too, is just.
Cultural right, like a lot of the senior developers grew up in C and.
If you're not familiar with rust, it's.
And has a lot of different like. It's very opinionated, and it, you know, enforces a lot of controls in terms of like.
You know, borrowing, you know, and things like that. So.
It's more complex than something like C.
When you 1st come to it.
So that's been slower, too. So this is just a general question about rust and the kernel. But.
We may start seeing it accelerate.
After this release.
Anybody here, use rust.
I don't use rust, but I did hear the rest. Maintainer stepped down recently.
For the Linux kernel. So.
Adoption might slow down rather than speed up the near future. I guess I'm not sure.
Yeah. Russ was a super hot language, and I think it's it's cooled off a little bit now, just because it's probably settling into the used cases where it's.
The best, you know.
But yeah, see, I mean, we're still back with C, you know, like Unix and C, we're still back with like.
1970, s technology.
Which is really interesting. Like, you know, it's usually in our industry. The 1st thing that works is what we stick with.
Okay. This one was good.
My my failure. I had.
Intended to.
Notify the Rust language group here in St. Louis about tonight's talk, and I failed to do it. But
For those of you who weren't aware there had been a Rus language group and.
They actually had cohosted a talk.
With us.
Right back.
I right? At the beginning of the pandemic. It was one of the.
Very early ones.
And they had actually been a group that had met regularly as a physical meeting, not online. And.
When Covid hit they very rapidly kind of shut down, and.
Eventually, just.
Stopped, ceased.
The the guy that we had talked to. Then the Coordinator, he wound up, moving to Europe.
And so he was kind of out of the loop.
And it was just this last year that somebody new moved into town and said, Well, damn it, I like the idea of Rus group. Why isn't this running? And he kicked it back in? So they've actually been meeting, I think, tomorrow. No, let me think. Here.
Yeah, I think it is. Tomorrow night's meeting. It's on our calendar and.
I keep meaning to to maybe invite them to sometime do a presentation or a joint meeting with us, just to give us all a little rust experience. So so yeah, hopefully, that'll be forthcoming.
That's awesome.
Yeah, I feel like, after Covid.
As we said before, you know, I feel like a lot of the meetups like evaporated like there's not as many in-person meetings anymore anywhere.
Okay, this was kind of funny. Basically, let us.
When.
Like people would.
Just thought he was like in a Linux conference, and they're like, Oh, you're at an AI Cubecon, and he's like the only thing that matters.
He's the kernel. I don't care about anything else which is really interesting about his personality, because, he's hyper focused right? He doesn't, you know, like wanna chase the next best thing or not, the next best thing. But like the next thing that comes up the next thing in the hype cycle. He's perfectly happy just to focus on the kernel and do nothing else. So he he said this obviously jokingly. But it was pretty funny.
They're talking about the specialization, too.
Right like now that Moore's law is kind of fading.
And scaling. So it was a cloud question. Right? So Derek is asking him. You know we're a coupon here. What are we.
And the thing that Linus really said here is like.
He's a colonel person, right, and the only thing he cares about is like how to make those workloads work better with Linux. But.
He's not really interested in Cloud or AI, or anything else.
He's gonna remain focused on what he's doing. So things like are.
They could just be up there. He's it doesn't matter.
So just a little bit about his personality, I think, is.
We could use on at the end of this, you know, because you know, probably what makes them a very good maintainer.
Up.
So this one.
This was really interesting. I put this up. I didn't know where to put this picture up or not, because a few about a decade ago.
And video was really bad about supporting Linux, and he got very mad and had a kind of uncharacteristic kind of angry moment back. Then.
He said.
With now with Nvidia, actually become one of the best contributors to Linux.
So I probably.
Maybe I should remove this image because it's not. But I just think it's just how things can change right like they went from, you know, not being great, and a lot of companies were not created open source in the past. And I've really.
You know, stepped.
But yeah, Nvidia's become one of the biggest contributors.
And so, yeah, that was kind of one of the things a side thing, I think.
People who've been around a while. Remember, when this happened.
There's some bad blood for a while there, and Nvidia didn't work so well with Linux.
They had a closed source driver, so.
I think.
They've been working on fixing that.
Yeah. Turns out when you make all the money you can spend like a tiny fraction of it on making your Linux support better. I mean, I don't think there's a coincidence between Nvidia just.
You know, cranking out tons of money, being like the company who supplies the hardware for all this AI stuff in the last 2 years.
And then suddenly becoming.
Better open source citizens like, I'm pretty sure. Thanks to the booze they have coming in. They just finally decided to fund some kind of program or team internally, that.
But we'll do this with the kernel. I mean, maybe I'm.
Maybe I'm you know, reading too much of the tea leaves there, but I I think there's a pretty straight line there, one to the other.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's an interesting point of view.
It's also that, like Nvidia's business has changed. Right? Like it was. They came in like graphics, cards for games, right? Essentially, or CAD.
And this whole tutor thing about you could use it for processing, and as AI has grown, they become more of a server company.
So you know they had a change right like, you know, having, you know, having proprietary drivers may not matter as much when you're.
Main business is, like, you know, serving large businesses.
You know that's not what they care about.
So.
Yeah. Man talk about playing the long game on that one, too, right? Didn't like initially come out like so long ago. But, man, it is paying off now. They have.
They have the most vendor lock in with that, you know. Maybe across the whole.
It industry, but.
Yeah. That's a good point.
They have vendor lock in that apple can only dream of with cuda. You know.
So Danny asked about AI, and it was a really interesting what is thought about AI. He's not really interested in it.
But what they've been thinking about is, can they use it like you saw the amazing demonstration before? What they're thinking about is.
Within Linux itself. Can they use it to? For like pull requests like, can they can they train it on the Linux kernel, and when someone opens up a pull request, it says, whether this is good or not.
Right.
So that's basically where he sees it. And he talks to a lot of people in the industry. But they don't see that as necessarily a code generation tool at the current time, but basically helping them with the Maintainers. And you know, verifying patches and things like that.
Alright!
Yeah, basically the same thing here. I think I'm not gonna go too much into it here. But basically they have a lot of simple tools right now that flag errors. He's hoping that with Llms they could have stronger tools.
I think that might be the final questions. So this is funny. So dirk as Chat Gbt. To ask him some questions for Linus, and it came out with this.
And.
This is really says a lot about Linux.
I mean Linus himself. Personally, he's like.
He's he's not a vision person right like he said. He's a plotting engineer, and he's proud of that right like he sees himself as an engineer. He's focused on the task at hand, and he doesn't, you know, which is really, I think, refreshing in an industry, you know, if you're an it
You know, there's a lot of hype in Bs around a lot of things in our industry, because there's so much money and opportunity around and.
You know, for 33 years now he's been focused on shipping kernels.
You know, focused on the kernel, making the kernel work better.
And he's not looking in the future anything. He's just focused on that. So, and he's very proud of doing that. And I think that's what makes him a very strong maintainer.
So, yeah. And then I think that's basically
The final thoughts. Right so. And then we can talk about it like the presentation. But yeah, I seem like it's very much a master craftsman, you know, intense focus, you know, when someone's been doing a single craft for decades, they become really masterful at it.
The project management, I think, is probably one of the most impressive things in the software industry. Just the sheer velocity of shipping that they do and the process. And I think that's really a good lesson in terms of.
As software projects scale up.
You know it, it really starts becoming into the management of the project itself.
Of how you get things done.
Yeah. And then an industry full of hype. And Bse is very happy in his nation. He's doing really well. So.
That is a summary of the talk.
So yeah, I I encourage everybody to go watch the talk. It's pretty great.
Thank you, Stephen. I did go out and follow the link and and actually look at the the actual talks. But I really appreciate it your commentary on it? Because it yeah, definitely.
Highlighted some other things, different aspects, and I.
Yeah.
I thought it was really good. So thank you. It's a good.
Additional view.
So.
Well, thanks for having me.
This is Stan. I I think that the you're.
Well.
Commentary.
If anybody else.
As a question. Just jump in there and ask. In the meantime, I'm gonna ask.
Either Steven or anybody else who knows. So.
We, we.
Well, Stan was. I think I think Stan was asking a question.
Oh, go ahead! Stan!
I was gonna say that this commentary that is separate from actually falling parallel.
With the.
Worked better than.
Showing parts of the.
Linus's talk, and then going into it.
Is, is much better because it allowed.
People here to give their.
Commentary on on the slides that you presented. So, Stephen, it worked out much better than I thought it would.
Thank you.
Oh, great! Thank you.
Eden.
There's.
Bye.
This is Randy. I just wanted to say, 1st of all.
I I think earlier at.
1 point probably from the Cv talk. I I think maybe you showed a little clip of how many.
Lines of code. There were.
And how many.
Any.
Actual subroutines or routines there were in the Linux code.
I'm curious. So.
Do we have any idea how many actual maintainers or developers there are in the world, since.
They don't work in one particular organization. They're contributors from different companies or different.
Places.
Linus said in the in the talk, that there were a thousand people.
Contributing to the kernel.
Okay.
Thereabouts.
Rick.
Yeah, I heard about 2,000 with 200 maintainers, new maintainers, every release.
Hmm.
Randy, you had a.
When Houston, you had a question or comment.
Yeah, basically, what I wanted to say was.
1st of all, great talk.
Nicely done.
One of the things that I I.
I learned from.
Not only would you had to say.
But it's proven in the industry that.
When you practice practice practice.
That you become the best at what you do.
And he's proven that in his field.
And
I think that's part of the reason why.
Linux is so good.
Because he has.
He started out, you know, as a as a young kid, and.
As a graduate of college and.
Said, Okay, let me do this project. And the next thing I know it's become a life project.
So.
And he's still doing it 33 years later. It's incredible, like it's
At such a high level for so long.
That's what I say to me. Strikes me as a master craftsman, right like he's still very passionate about doing the very best he can.
With it.
So yeah, I think that's the most impressive that I got because I.
I haven't really seen, you know, even though I haven't really seen Linus talk a lot like maybe a couple of short videos. But to see him for extended time was very interesting.
Yep.
Have we resolved the question of of if Linux uses get or.
Not to dwell on that point about how many.
Developers. Anybody got numbers.
Of how many developers there are, and.
Like Freebsd or Microsoft Land.
Freebsd, and what? Listen to some of their talks.
Your Development group is much smaller.
But they are some hardcore guys that have been doing it just as long.
Making sure that.
Free Bsd, cause that's what I follow more than opener.
That.
It does what it does well, and it has turned to be.
An operating system.
Because the different license for.
Like network routers and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Because even some of the old guys were.
Criticized during the 20 or 30, some years that.
Even the default installer from freebsd projects. There's not.
Even to this day.
Have a graphics installer. It's still sort of a.
It's text based. It doesn't scroll up the screen. It's got a menu based system.
But it still isn't some.
Flashy, gooey, wizard thing.
They don't think it's necessary for what it is.
And doing actually install a desktop.
They'll let some.
Effectively downstream. Make it so, ghost Psd, if you wanna.
Pre installed desktop.
Here's.
There's a lot of serious in between both groups.
But they do think slightly different. There is a different philosophy in between the.
Mit license, and the Gano license.
Okay.
Oh, so I looked it up. It's over 2,000.
Yeah. And and it looks like to start with you.
There's there's a geto.
But you start with.
So maybe just a passes through. And then I think that.
Pretty interesting.
But I I'm on.
On the 50 developers.
I want something from Linus within the last couple of months. But it was a video.
Youtube video from about 8 years.
He actually used 3 numbers.
About a dozen. Some people are hardcore people he talks to every day.
50. People are.
Kind of people that are constantly in the kernel.
And the 1,000, or whatever.
Number is.
Some people have come up with some sort of patch that does get all the way through to be approved and applied.
So it's.
To him at the time that he gave the speech. It's like 3 different numbers depending on.
Yes, distributed right? There's maintainers for separate parts of the kernel.
How intensely they're involved in being a colonel.
So Stephen.
From from
Either. The 2 talks you've highlighted here.
Or if you care to, even.
Think of other things in the conference.
Any. What was the thing that surprised you most.
I think the scale. So. I was mostly on the cube side. I think the scale of.
A lot of age. Stuff is going on, like, you know, in terms of.
What developers in China are focused on and the ones who came there like it's a lot of edge devices, you know, like, in terms of like Nio.
Another car company. They're, you know, they're using Cube Edge and.
You know, putting that in like, you know, just.
Managing millions of devices right and centrally. And how you do that?
So there's a lot of work. There's a lot of work about running huge AI models.
And like using that within kubernetes so Kubernetes is really becoming like this massive distributed operating system right?
Hmm.
And much the way that Linux is like. It's.
Kubernetes is that next layer up that like companies are basing on at least.
That's what it feels like. So I think that was they had real time translations, right? Because.
If you spoke in English, they translate in real time to Chinese, and the other way back right? So I thought that was pretty slick.
So yeah, I think that's the biggest thing that there's a lot of really good work going on there like
A lot of in distributed learning edge devices.
You know, scheduling.
I think those are like the big themes that I saw coming up.
So, yeah.
And the kernel just keeps rocking and rolling.
Nice.
How was your talk? Have you ever given a talk at that big of a crowd before.
Oh, yeah, no, this is actually not. I've so I try to give talks a lot, especially since I could go to different places. When I give a talk.
So I I tend to get.
A few years, a few times a year, so.
This was fine. I did it with my coworker. It was a decent. It was mostly to get to Hong Kong into
It's at the top. Went really. Well, the Demos went perfectly, so we practiced a lot, though.
So, yeah, and we did all about testing patterns, which is something very useful to our customers, even if it's not kind of dry material.
Yeah.
It's.
Yeah, I've spoken in
Bologna. A Paris is here.
Bunch of other places. I don't even know.
So.
I get the word. Yeah. So I work remotely. So you know, that's 1 of my travel things. I get to go around.
Nice.
Yeah.
And you started off talking about clusters. You said something about clusters, and I was wondering what you meant by that.
When you were talking about. You know, clusters of things that you're controlling with.
Hcl. Or something.
And I know that, like Kubernetes, like there's.
Right, but that.
Pods which are like a group. But then and then there's notes in a cluster. Right? But then, is that what you're talking about? Or was there another layer.
The, the.
Boom.
The layer we're working on is something called crossplain, which sits on top of Kubernetes, and it basically allows kubernetes to manage anything outside the cluster.
So we take, like the Kubernetes Api and the the controller Runtime.
That's built into everything, and we build like aws. And as your providers on top of it.
Because a lot of companies are starting to move everything into kubernetes. Right? So now, with developer.
When they deploy their app, they could just ask for like a database.
And have it be provisioned.
So this is.
Obviously, there's a very strong tool in this space called terraform. But we're kind of moving towards people who are building more like enterprise platforms, internal clouds.
So we tend to see.
Pretty strong adoption of big companies for this kind of stuff.
So, yeah, that's what I focus on. I.
I was in infrastructure for a long time. I felt like this. Crossing concept is probably one of the strongest things out there for infrastructure.
And I. Still, you know, we still have a lot of growing to do. But.
I feel like it's very well positioned.
So we had somebody from Seou a couple years ago. Talk about running vms inside of Kubernetes!
So how does that? Does that play in with what you're doing at all? Or is it separate or related or not?
It's separate. We think about like we use Kubernetes as a control plane. So so this is an important thing like control planes are one of the fundamental technologies that came out of the Internet right? Like it's you need a single way to manage a bunch of different devices.
Right like, in in much way, operating system can handle multiple devices right and schedule work.
A control plane can handle multiple things of infrastructure right? Like you do the same.
Use the same Api, which is a Kubernetes api to manage S. 3 buckets or.
Gke clusters or github organizations. Right? So the user comes. Ctl, apply, and then the controllers go off and provision it for them.
And it it reconciles continuously. So we're basically cross plane is basically what's known as a universal control plan.
Right, and it says it's since it's based on kubernetes. It could manage anything.
In a standardized way.
Right, using the Kubernetes, Api and all the other tooling around it.
So that's where we compete in.
Yeah. And I think we're very unique. And you know, very strongly positioned. So it's.
But yeah.
Well.
Cool. So yeah, it's yeah. If you talk about terraforms, it's.
Kind of a.
It's based on Kubernetes so like in a lot of the same ways as Kubernetes.
Replace like Vm style workloads with distributed pods and stuff. You're you're seeing companies now start to have their infrastructure abstracted out into controllers like this.
Like this.
Hmm.
I think you said your title was solution Architect, and I think that's the next.
Step up for me if I want to keep going up. So what do you think about the solution? Architect.
Role and.
Do you have any advice for a tech lead? Who's trying to.
Step up that way.
Next.
I think that there's 3 things to it. The 1st one is being technically strong. I think you showed a lot of those here, too. The second one is being able to communicate technology to other people.
And kind of understand how things work like.
For customer problems. So.
It's the best solution. Architects are people who are generally good with customers and good technically.
So I think those are the.
The the skills that you need, like.
So it's.
Yeah, I mean, I think you know, creating content. A huge part of that is creating content. Reference. Things like that.
So yeah, just have just having experience, especially in the enterprise, is important.
Yeah, I think my hangup is aws, because I'm pretty sure they're gonna want me to be an aws guru to be a solution architect at my current place, or in many places, and.
Man I've tried studying so that aws stuff like on my spare time.
But I just keep getting this feeling like I'm basically.
Memorizing Mcdonald's menu in order to come like the greatest.
Mcdonald's salesman ever for. But and I know I shouldn't think about it that way, right? I should think about like the cool stuff that allows you to build rapid prototyping all that, but.
It's just this part in the back of my head that it's like.
Am I just becoming a shell for this Cloud Company? You know I don't know.
Yeah, I I could tell you with our providers. So we map everything in aws into a Kubernetes object or.
We, we cover what probably 90% of the Apis for the Big Cloud and Aws alone has.
A 1,000 things that you can configure.
And each one of those is like.
Lots. So you think about S. 3 bucket or something. There's 900 more things with an aws to configure like that.
Yep.
And and the other big clouds are like that, too. So it is.
Physically impossible.
To learn all this right, like, even if you learn there's there's 3,000 things between the 3 clouds, and it's.
So that's yeah. You just have to be able to learn very quickly.
Right like you just have to know the basics. And because.
And hope that, like the 20 that's common is good enough, because otherwise it's yeah. You just have to be able to absorb information very quickly.
Because I run into stuff I don't know at all. Today somebody's asking me about your Dns Pointers. I'm like, I don't know.
So I had to look it up and.
Figure it out.
Yeah.
Cool. Thanks for that. Yeah, I don't know how conversations. If anybody else has a question.
Go sean.
Oops!
Oh, no, I don't. I don't have anything else. If it's.
Offered.
Oh, okay.
Just to step up.
Just a quick
Background on the setting. So how many people were there at Cubecon.
There was only about 350, which is not a lot, and this comes down to.
That they usually hold it, hold it in something like Shanghai, or something like that. Hong Kong actually has a.
It's more difficult for.
Chinese people to attend it.
Whereas it's easier for Westerners.
Oh, wow!
So it was smaller than normal. It was really good. Some very strong engineers there
And I said we met the folks who do. Kcl. Which is an incredibly well run project. It's so we'll see it's I mean. It may not affect the folks in the Linux space, but I think.
We see it as very promising in the Kubernetes space.
Yeah, so that was nice.
Yeah, cause usually, coupons are like 5 to 15,000 people.
Wow!
Yeah.
So the animal is kind of like the Javascript of Kubernetes. Right? So like cause I'm thinking about this. Think about all the Ui frameworks that compile 2 javascript, because that's what runs from the Browser. And so now we're having languages and things that compile to gamble, because that's what runs in Kubernetes that's what.
Yeah.
Book.
Declare that we can create kubernetes, so.
Well, Kubernetes is a declarative system, right? Like so.
It's you basically tell it what you want it to do. Now, we have something called functions, which is, we create the declarative state. But we have pipelines that actually create it. So you could have conditions and loops because.
It's just raw that you give.
Kubernetes, and you can't do anything else with it, really. So you need tools around it.
For like dynamics. So that's part of cross plan. It has this thing called the composition engine. Where.
You could say like, you know, wait until the bucket is created before you create the database. You could do things like that.
So yeah, it's that's where it becomes a very powerful framework. Right? Like that. You can have custom logic within the cluster to do things.
Yeah, you mentioned terraform earlier. And there's all this. I guess it's been going on for quite a while now. But there's this, you know, fork.
Open tofu, which is a terrible I don't.
i i i think that name's terrible. But what do you think? Do you have a.
Are you back in one horse or the other about how that's gonna shake out, or I I don't know. I just think it's interesting.
I don't know if I really have an opinion or anything about it.
We're we're avoiding it. I have to say, like we are sticking with terraform right now until our lawyers figure things out, the Cncf. Has adopted open tofu. Right? So it's a Cnc project which is kind of the umbrella organization of Linux, of.
Kubernetes
But we really don't like we focus on cross plane a lot like in all honesty, it.
It doesn't really affect us. It affects us a little bit on the.
One provider we have that embeds terraform in it, but.
We actually got rid of the terraform, and we talked to providers directly, because terraform cli is very inefficient.
But.
It's yeah, it's and they. The newest version is open till 4. Slightly incompatible. Now.
With terraform.
So it'll be interesting to see which side wins. I think.
Yeah, I don't know. I can't. I honestly can't predict who's gonna come out of that.
Yeah. And I know that somebody was asking about Ibm earlier. But you know it might be that open tofu is a bit more.
Cause. That's also Ibm, I think, mostly behind open tofu as well. So.
Maybe that'll end up being the more.
Well.
Ibm bought hashicorp. Right? So hashicorp are the folks that make terraform they got they IP. A couple of years ago they were struggling.
That's struggling, but that having the explosive growth. So Ibm bought them. That purchase hasn't completed yet. I don't think.
So, but Ibm will own hashicorp.
After that.
And they make vault 2, which is another super popular tool that a lot of folks use. An open tofu is basically backed by the Cnc. And a bunch of companies like Emv. 0 harness, like folks who had written.
Web. Gui's on top of terraform.
Like for provisioning software. So that's kind of the constellation around open tofu.
Yeah.
Does. Does hashic change to one of these like not quite opens like open source. But you can't make money off of us licenses right? And that's what started the whole thing. So.
Yeah, there's a Bsl, yeah, they they last August. I think it was about a year now.
Right.
Which I don't know. I'm still torn on those you know myself personally like I understand, like.
At 1 point I get it right like, if your elastic search and then Amazon you and takes all your money because you're trying to run a cloud thing, I mean I get it. But at the same time.
There's downsides, you know, like.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's tough. It was hard for Hesher to make money on it, because there's a lot of people who are, you know, selling run terraform.
This is Stan. I'd like to remind everybody the 10 min warning.
Traditionally.
We would end the meetings at 9 o'clock, because they would throw us out of the restaurant or the.
Library. Things like that. We do not have to end the meeting. Things are going quite well with the discussions we're having now, though.
What does everybody say? Keep on going, or what.
Alternate.
2.
And I'll.
Alternative Shawn could.
Preview, the the site he had been building for us.
That'd be cool.
If you wanted.
Yeah, I'll just put it on the background while we keep talking, I guess. Sure.
Okay, that'd be great.
And I have the Pdf. The presentation. How should I share it with the group.
If you.
Set.
Oh, go ahead!
Send it to editor at.
Email it to editor at Slug Org, and we'll put it up on the.
The presentation archives.
Okay.
Thank you, Stephen.
Of course.
Looks like your last talk was about.
Was it 2021.
Oh, yeah.
It was about cozy, the common system interface. So it seems like it seems like this is a very similar thing to what you've been talking about to us with upscale, so I guess you've been.
Hold up!
In this common control.
Lifestyle for quite a while. Now.
Did did I talk to this group about Kosi is actually something I'm actually gonna be in London next week.
And they're gonna have a conference for it. The Talos Company. I think it's very exciting. Actually, it's.
Api for Linux, right? So because kubernetes came on and kind of abstracted out.
The operating system.
It's really good. Like, you have an Api driven that's basically focused on doing nothing else but running containerized workloads.
Which is kind of the natural like when I gave that talk right, because.
Unix, was designed as a multi.
User terminal sharing system right with shared file systems and.
That's not what anybody needs anymore. Actually, the vast majority of workloads are either containerized or phones or embedded devices. So.
The workloads that came from Unix with the serial attached terminals, and all those things don't really matter right, and having shared libraries.
Doesn't necessarily matter anymore. So that's.
The idea of cozy is
Api driven 1st Linux.
Hmm.
So.
Yeah, it's i i'm not really involved in. I'm just happened to be in London, and they're gonna have a talis event. So I may go over and see it.
So.
Wow!
Yeah.
Let me digress for just a moment. Stephen. I didn't.
Give a very detailed introduction so so quickly. Tell us your company, and.
You know. What does your company usually do.
Our company is called outbound. So we're the primary. So it's a company that's Vc funded right? So.
We're past series. B.
And I approach them.
A few years ago. So I've actually been there for a bit now.
They write cloud infrastructure, automating software, right? So they wrote the cross plane which runs the top of Kubernetes.
And now we have this product that we sell to companies. Right? So.
You can imagine, like a very large bank or something like that. They we give them that they could run multiple control planes.
Like. So what that means is that they can offer their developers like a ui, to request infrastructure in a standardized way.
So.
That's kind of it. There's this whole.
Push right now in terms of.
Creating internal development platforms and internal clouds.
And we're one of the stronger players in that field. But there's it's still a forming industry.
So that's what we do.
Yeah, and it's.
You know I was working before I joined them. I was working for mastercard out there in St. Louis here.
And we have, like 20 different devops, pipelines here, and they're all terrible.
And this is really like a standardized way to do it across the company.
So.
You know, we're still.
You know, we're still. I think we haven't hit the growth yet, but we're getting some.
Massive customers in terms of the corporations who are using our software. So.
It's very promising.
Nice.
Good to stay up to good for us to stay up on what you're up to.
Yeah.
I I've been in cloud and stuff for a while since Docker came out. I that really opened my eyes.
About possibilities.
Yeah.
What was the name of your company again? I'm just updating your bio. Since you're talking about it. The one on the website was a bit out of date.
Let me let me see if I can share it. Here.
It's upbound, dot I/O.
You.
Where's mine?
Yeah.
And as you mentioned Docker, I.
I'm sure the 1st time you spoke to us that was.
I think the 1st time any of us had really.
Heard about Docker and the whole.
Concept of containerization becoming a common thing. So I remember your talk, whatever that was, I guess.
4 years ago.
It's it's it's gotta be. Yeah.
Maybe 5. No, I mean it. It.
It really opened the eyes for a number of us of.
Where things were going. So.
Yeah, I think it was. It was fundamental. And I think you see things in like Telos with
That just new ways and core OS, new ways of thinking about Linux itself right like that. We don't get stuck.
In old patterns.
So it was.
And and I kind of feel that way about this crossing stuff. It's hard cause it's a tough problem. It's complex and.
We're competing at something like terraform, which is really good. So we have to be better.
But.
It architecturally, it's probably the best thing.
Right. Kubernetes is very strong right now, and it's growing.
There!
It's becoming like that.
Layer.
That's, you know, in the same way that Linux has become like just the standard right? And it just disappears. Kubernetes.
Is increasingly being like that, too.
It just every company has it.
It runs workloads consistently across every organization on the planet. So.
It's getting that kind of, you know. Momentum.
So the next thing is.
You know. Use it to manage everything aside from your applications, and that's where cross plan will come in.
Huh!
Excellent.
Just a.
As we go forward. Stan, already kind of gave the traditional 10 min warning, and that probably also is a spot where, although you know, we.
Love and appreciate any continued.
Presence and contribution. If Steve can stay with us, and if anybody thinks of another question,
Wonderful
But
Either if you have to run off Steven or.
If I can just broaden it out. If if anyone has a
More general question, something that doesn't.
Apply to Stephen, or even Sean's talk tonight. But just something you wanted to throw out to the group.
Hey? I was working on this this week, and this didn't work, or anybody got any ideas on this now would probably be an appropriate time to open your mouth and.
Ask a question.
Well, I have one question. This is Randy. Again.
I. I'm just wondering what you think is kind of the future look like for.
While people are thinking about that.
Stan, any final words. You tonight.
Oh, somebody else was asking a question.
Up.
Okay.
Yeah.
Is that Randy.
Yes.
Yeah, but yeah.
Randy, ask away!
Yeah, I'm asked. My question is,
I wanted to know if
Randy, I'm not hearing your voice.
I hear him, though.
So I don't know if your microphone's open.
Yeah.
You do hear him. Okay.
Alright. Let me move this up. Can you hear me now?
Yep, I can hear you, sir.
Now now I hear you.
Okay.
I didn't move the.
Microphone.
So basically, my question to Stephen is, Do you know what the future looks like for.
The kernel.
And anything new that you expect to see.
Coming or directions.
I think the kernels increasingly gonna be put to the kind of workloads that you see that where all the money is right, who's gonna pay for development. And that's.
Cloud, AI, and those kind of workloads, and I think.
You know, and I think, like you folks talk about things like here, like Debian and Red hat, and like their traditional Linux OS, I do feel like.
Those aren't getting as much investment right? Like the traditional workloads on a Vm. Are kind of stagnant. I think so.
I I think you're gonna see more and more.
The kind of workloads that are.
Containerized or Gpu centric.
Like a designed to run and what I mean, Gpric designed to run in large processing clusters right where they can run their models and train them.
Across, you know thousands of servers.
So you're seeing a lot of work. You see that with the scheduler here, like there's lots of work going on everywhere in terms of like scalability across Linux nodes.
And that's just gonna increase. So I don't know how that's gonna affect like this doesn't have the big vision right? Like you just focus on.
The core engine and making it run. Well. So I think that's where it's gonna go.
I'm just wondering if you see any improvements in.
Drivers drivers that are probably not as common.
Like fingerprintners, or.
Fingerprint Readers.
You know some of the.
Maybe even pos type tools.
It's it's hard to say, because a lot of this stuff, I think.
There's a clash between, like hobbyist versus corporate.
Right. And it's who's paying for the development.
So. Yeah, I don't know. I I don't know how to answer that. I mean, you know, I was doing some research in the past, and it looked like for like even for something like Debbie, and the number of.
People contributing has been pretty much flat for the last decade.
So.
It's I think it depends a lot.
Like, who's gonna be, you know, writing those drivers and including them and everything.
Is it the same people, or is it people the same number of people leaving? It's coming in.
It's hard to say. I mean, I think.
A lot of people are.
Hold. You know, it's the open source revolution really started kicking off in like the nineties.
Right, so.
You have a lot of people who are like in the prime of their careers, who are doing it.
Do you think that's part of what
Do you think that that that.
That.
People have come, more complacent.
Because things just work.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think.
It. It's just part of maturing technology like, I can't remember the last time I cared about a Linux kernel version, right? It was probably in the 5.
As I said before, when, like figuring out when Docker was coming out, and you know, for layered file systems. But.
Aside from that, like the way Kubernetes.
The Linux kernel.
There hasn't been a lot of changes.
Right so.
You know. Obviously, there's like.
You know, Gpu stuff is becoming very big right now, but.
It's.
It's not, you know. That's what I'm saying, so mature that you know they're just shipping constantly, and it's.
It's just the maturity of the product, right like, or the project that.
They're not breaking things and things are not. There's not big changes coming.
You know. We'll we'll see what the rest I mean. They're still coming through right. We'll see with.
Those seem like kind of niche applications that really just hit a few people.
I played with Russ. But in what you're referring to I'm not really.
Visualizing.
How that applies.
Cause. I had a question earlier that.
Even though C. Is a very old language.
The Gcc. That we would download today.
And write some simple applications or tools.
And I, and I think different than you do, because.
You're thinking on.
Corporate, Wide.
Cloud, based.
Applications that you would drown in details if you had to configure every last Linux server.
But Lenny says still remained in small computer space.
I'm gonna have to change my career cause I already have.
Me being a.
System admin. And a small doesn't really exist much anymore.
But I was able, because I had a hardware background.
Move a little bit sideways and find work.
But I'm talking about wanting Linux on a.
Small machine like a Esp. 32.
Controlling some sort of device, whether it's a 3D printer, a laser cutter, or whatever.
And Linux isn't gonna evacuate that space. But.
Well, no, it's not. Linux is going to be the dominant system for pretty much everything.
It's it's really the what's running on top of it.
Right and.
People in that space don't think like you, and vice versa.
I think the traditional use case where, like you, log into a gui and things like that, or use it as a server.
Those are kind of shrinking a little bit where it's either an embedded device that has like a firmware flashed onto it, or it's just a node in a cluster that could get replaced.
So it's kind of different. That's the difference of Linux is, you know, we're.
Most of the workloads are going.
You know the thing where you like, you know. Put rack and stack a Linux box and.
Or one, you know is.
Or launch a Linux Vm. Those use cases are.
Not, as you know, they're becoming less common.
But a lot of it.
The development is slowed down because a lot of them.
Like was mentioned, is all mature.
Yeah.
You don't need to download a new copy of.
Lieber office. If you're.
Home office or small office.
Pretty much if you copy of office works just fine. You're not.
Updating it weekly.
So.
If you're a small charity or something, and you're using Linux because you don't have a bunch of licensing issues.
You're still gonna run a simple stack.
The mention of Alpine.
Alpine has less licensing problems. If you install it on.
1, 7, 6, or $7 instance, because you want it to do a backup. That's the extra bug.
You're gonna run a simple app stack.
And it's easy to deploy one, and about 7 min.
Cause. That's what I run. But.
A lot of me. I'm I'm partially retired.
So I'm not working in corporate America anymore. And I.
Don't!
Really worry about.
The latest relation, because I'm finding in the Orlando area.
I couldn't find a job, anyway.
But I'm finding that.
What is sort of solar returning to the United States are.
You can find places that still are making printed boards, because, even though it's cheap to make in China.
You still want to do some.
Where you don't have to.
Have to go through that now, if you make a bunch of production boards, it's cheaper than that's in your own boards. But there's still a lot of small stuff.
Still being done in this place, because there are.
Small machine shops and other stuff.
Would use the Linux.
But they're still talking to.
Some sort of device. Now, if they have some online sales, presence.
They'll go.
You know.
Farm that out to a big company, and then they'll.
Rent that piece of computer.
And and pay for it, and it will be something.
Azure or.
Google Cloud, or or.
Aws.
Yeah, I think it's just new. Use cases, right? Like, if you look at the embedded device usually operating system.
Right. They build it, and they pack it, and they ship it down. So you're not really maintaining it. You just.
Go from A to B, and back and forth, so.
Increasingly, Linux is very just a mutable.
And just like a core kernel with just a few services around it.
So.
The stuff that I played with Lenny, so I didn't want my vms.
I own a couple of raspberry pies and.
I installed home automation on it.
And if I want some specialized tool like I.
I can't off the shelf today, even ordering from China.
Find a couple devices that work exactly the way I want to.
I if I had a hot water heater, and I wanted that. It wasn't leaking, because it would flood my garage.
I could with the simple tool of
Either an Arduino, an interface to a.
Esp. 30.
Come up with a dedicated sensor that can.
Monitored my hot water, but for me to simply go buy that.
I'm gonna have to.
Mangle something that's similar.
There's.
There's still.
Hold on! Quick!
Quote unquote kitchen table development by.
And yes, some of it is Hobby based. Some of it's amateur radio based.
But.
There is that still small stuff happening, and no, it doesn't have any of the budgets of the Big Cloud stuff.
And I don't ever expect it will.
It's a niche market.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's amazing, actually, that we have this for all this stuff free is incredible.
For Nick's little project.
It's a very good point.
But back on the rust thing.
What is actually being added to the kernel, because rust itself.
Both cargo is.
Your overall maintainer.
And.
Rusty, which I did play with, not internal space, but in user space.
And it was an arm wrestling, session.
To get that rough compiler to do something I could easily have done in python or Ruby.
And 1 3rd the time. Now it's an experience that adds up to some of those hours.
But rust is real anal on what it passes.
Yep.
It wants to make sure there no, is no errors.
And it really is an arm wrestling, session.
To get it to even compile something until you.
Pick all those nits.
Yeah, so so rust. This is one of the challenges why developers are not accepting it. But rust is much more safe.
Right like it's
Has a lot of memory safety, things that can eliminate entire classes of bugs that see creates.
So that's the hope.
But yeah, it's a whole new wave programming. It has, like, Mls, kind of language, you know some functional things in it. So.
It's definitely more as you commented. There, it's more complex to program.
So
That's kind of the struggle.
I. I have an analogy for it playing with that compiler to just do some simple scripting I had done in the past, and other languages.
Was like having your mother-in-law.
Nag you from the backseat of the car about your driving.
Did you folks get my email, the Pdf.
Just a.
Yes, we did.
Perfect.
Thank you.
Cool.
I love the mother-in-law Id, and that that's a visualization. Thank you.
Go down, speed up more the other way.
Yeah. Russ is very strict. So, yep.
It's all, and.
I think.
Cool.
And we have an industry that's going towards complexity and specialization right? Like. So.
Cloud is complex, these distributed complex, these.
So you know, these applications web applications are getting more and more complex. So we're just seeing a very, a lot of specialization in our industry.
Where.
You know.
All the interactions between everything is getting.
It's complex, like, it's, you know, they they like to pretend like, computer science is all like algorithms and stuff. But 90% of your time. It's just stitching to get a different frameworks. And Apis.
And there's a lot of complexity. And all those interactions.
Well, and.
Well, this is Stan, and I'm ready to end a meeting.
Empty. Thank you so much for everybody's time. I really appreciated it.
Wait!
Hey, thank you, Stephen. This was really great. It was almost like we were in Hong Kong. I mean, we.
Yeah, it was great. I.
We kind of got the experience and the view. I loved it so. And I think everyone.
Thank you. Everybody.
Thank you. Good night, Stephen, and put a bookend here on the recording. This has been Wednesday, the 11th of September 24. This has been the St. Louis Linux Unix users group slug.
Dot org.
Our regular General Monthly Meeting.
And Stephen Barelli has been our main speaker tonight. He just came back from the conference in Hong Kong.
And gave us some wonderful information, both from Linus, Torvalds, keynote, and also from the session on.
Linux kernel Cdes. So we really appreciate that our tutorial this evening was.
From Sean Tree House and gave us good AI tools.
To.
Gemini, and.
Versal.
And we appreciate those. And with that thank you all for coming, and good night.
At this point I'm going to end the recording. If I can find a button.