gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

nmon is now available on sourceforge. It has been released under the GPL and there is already a nmon debian package.

The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year.

I didn’t see that coming.

Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux device drivers – covered by the GPL.

“The Linux device drivers we are releasing are designed so Linux can run in enlightened mode, giving it the same optimized synthetic devices as a Windows virtual machine running on top of Hyper-V. Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. We worked very closely with the Hyper-V team at Microsoft to make that happen.”

As of late I think someone in Redmond is trying to drive RMS crazy and it looks like they’re doing a good job ;-)

Seriously though, this is good because it is in Microsoft’s best interest – which should mean that the drivers actually work well in real-world applications – and it makes it easy for Microsoft’s clients to run Linux applications on Windows without having to port everything to Windows.

Update 7/21: Please also refer to Greg Kroah-Hartmann’s blog post and the lkml post.

My final open Debian bug – #159327 – has been closed.

Not that I know too much about payment processing at PayPal, but each time I read a story like this that says “we’re replacing System i/p/z with System x boxes and it’s so much cheaper” I always wonder two things.

1) As a payments company do you really want to “follow the Linux kernel development process” just to process a few transactions per second? Is it really a prerequisite to have people that know the kernel? A moment ago we were still talking about a payment system, not a device driver.

2) Does it sound sensible to run thousands of servers and maintain the staff and software to actually do it? – I have to say that I always found it interesting to see how much workload large systems can process and how few people you need to do it.

The Debian project confirmed that Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 ’etch’ will be released in December 2006. (Yes guys, that means this year :) ) – There will even be a bug squashing party in Vienna on September 8th – 10th. [via esa]

What we all knew and had already seen years ago has now been certified. So for whoever needs that paper, Debian is now certified as carrier-grade.