//”Gravedigger\\
When
you dig my grave\\
Could you make it shallow\\
So that I can
feel the rain”//

– Dave
Mathews

Via cosmico.net I went over to read the recent second act of the Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate. What follows are some interesting quotes I found inside (actually the post title is one of them also):

>Try rebuilding the entire operating system as described in the manual. The whole build, kernel + user-mode drivers and all the user-mode servers (125 compilations in all) takes about 5-10 seconds.

>Recently, my Ph.D. student Jorrit Herder, my colleague Herbert Bos, and I wrote a paper entitled Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure? and submitted it to IEEE Computer magazine, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. It was accepted and published in the May 2006 issue. In this paper we argue that for most computer users, reliability is more important than performance and discuss four current research projects striving to improve operating system reliability. Three of them use microkernels.

>The problem with distributed algorithms is lack of a common time reference along with possible lost messages and uncertainty as to whether a remote process is dead or merely slow. None of these issues apply to microkernel-based operating systems on a single machine.

>When two or more processes can access the same data structures, you have to be very, very careful not to hang yourself. It is exceedingly hard to get this right, even with semaphores, monitors, mutexes, and all that good stuff.

>Even the people working on Vista see they have a problem and are moving drivers into user space, precisely what I am advocating.

>Actually, MINIX 3 and my research generally is NOT about microkernels. It is about building highly reliable, self-healing, operating systems. I will consider the job finished when no manufacturer anywhere makes a PC with a reset button.

>The average user does not care about even more features or squeezing the last drop of performance out of the hardware, but cares a lot about having the computer work flawlessly 100% of the time and never crashing. Ask your grandma.

>This is our goal: systems that can detect and repair their own faults.

I was reading through a brief introduction to Donald Knuth in this article and is it just my impression or does he look like Yoda in that picture?

I’ve recently been working a lot on remote ssh consoles. Today I wondered if there was any way to make the connections go faster, after all I have 415 Kbps upstream and the server I’m working on also has good connectivity, there’s no reason for slowness. I then found this article on reusing ssh connections that made me learn a new OpenSSH feature, the ability to reuse the already existing connection to a remote host when I want to open subsequent connections. Here is what the author had to say:

>“In the course of a typical day I’m sure we all open a plethora of ssh connections to our servers. I would also wager that most of us have multiple connections open to some systems. While these multiple connections don’t take up any noticeable amount of system resources each of these connections does take up some of your valuable time to establish.”

* “Quick-Tip: Reusing OpenSSH connections to the same host”

A funny thing about this is that since one is using the same connection the “motd” buffer or something gets flooded with “Last login from x.x.x.x” messages. Still haven’t found a way to clean it.