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"I and the other Kernel.org admins would like to announce downtime for ALL kernel.org machines (this includes all of the mirror machines, the public machines and the backend master). The downtime is scheduled to start on or around April 2nd, 2008 on or around 0001 UTC," began a GPG signed message on the Linux kernel mailing list from John 'Warthog9' Hawley, one of the kernel.org admins. Referencing a recent Slashdot discussion that compared Linux and FreeBSD performance, he continued:
"After much deliberation, research and argument in #korg (along with screaming matches between HPA and I over dinner) we are upgrading the kernel.org machines from Fedora Core 5 to FreeBSD 7.0. This decision does not come lightly to the Kernel.org admins, and we would like to point out several key things that helped us form our decision:"
John concluded, "we feel that we can better serve our mirrors, our users and the community by making the switch, and we hope to have the transition done very shortly."
Every year the lkml sees a handful of April 1'st gags, and this year was no exception. One of the more elaborate jokes was Dave Jones [interview]' announcement of a new Linux-like operating system for the x86-64 architecture called "Davix". He begins his announcement, "do you pine for the nice days of Linux-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on Linux? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)" Those who go so far as to download the 12MB tarball will find a 2.6.11 kernel stripped down to only support the x86-64 architecture. A README within the tarball explains, "Davix is the result of Linux 2.6.11, lots of rm -rf, and removal of legacy obsolete features such as devfs, i386 architecture support, niche architectures such as ia64, and removal of a whole bunch of other junk, whilst still remaining 'usable'."
Co-postmaster of the lkml David Miller, forwarded a joke email that he had received about the release of the 2.7 Linux kernel, listing the changed files as, "pretty much everything, as usual...". Evgeniy Polyakov offered a patch to remove i386 support from the kernel, calling the architecture "absolutely unused in [the] real world, unsupported by vendors and definitely hard to build from commodity hardware. Due to it's famous bugability there are tons of quirks all over the place in the Kernel tree, so it is only begining. Let's create our OS the best all over the world - let's remove i386." And Jeroen Vreeken offered a benchmark to "measure the performance of the kernel for its most important user group, the kernel hacker." His "results" indicated little change since the 1.2 kernel which he attributed to "either the kernel hasn't regressed for years in this respect (which would mean somebody is doing a fine job indeed) or [...] the average kernel hacker simply doesn't do much usufull anyway..."
Well, April Fool's Day is over, thank god. For a person such as myself, and many others in the technology-interested community, this day usually sucks. You cannot trust anything, albeit, some things are blatent and funny, others are just confusing. In example, Google's GMail...
This week, KernelTrap has been honored by an exclusive interview with the elusive kernel hacker, Renaldo Esp. Living adjacent to the largest contiguous wilderness area on this planet, Renaldo describes himself as a "Wilderness Alaskan".
"Renaldo has had a profound impact upon the face of kernel hacking, though with his typical modesty he expresses his surprise that we've taken notice. He offers insights into a number of current events in the open source world, including with Linux, *BSD and the GNU/Hurd. From questions in licensing, to the BitKeeper drama, to the name GNU/Linux, to the timeless issue of flossing after hacking... It's all here.
Linus recently returned from a two week vacation, announcing the release of "a largish 2.5.8-pre1 patch". Following the announcement, he commented on the earlier April Fool's message. He says, "PS.
Straight out of George Orwell's novel, 1984, an email hit the OpenBSD announce mailing list attributed to the Minister of Propaganda. It "announced" Microsoft's decision to drop the NT kernel in favor of a new secure effort based on OpenBSD, called Windows BSD.
Par for the course, "shocking" email hit the lkml on April 1'st attributed to Linus Torvalds. This year's email stated, "Linux needs new leadership", putting Linus' succesor up to a vote. A surprising number of people thought the email was real, expressing dismay at Linus' "choice" to abandon Linux. The contrived email follows.
