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Versione in lingua italiana: Intervista a Rik van Riel

Rik van Riel was born in the Netherlands in 1978. He started using GNU/Linux in 1994 and hès one of the most active Linux developers right now. After he worked as Linux consulent for a dutch company, he was assumed by Conectiva S.A., the biggest Linux company of South America. His engagement for Linux is turned mainly at Virtual Memory's gestion. Together with Andrea Arcangeli he was responsible of kernels' 2.2 and 2.4 virtual memory gestion.

AS: Hey Rik. First of all I would like to thank you for your kind disposal.

RvR: Hello. I'm at your disposal.

With kernel 2.4.10 we have seen that Linus Torvalds has preferred Arcangelìs VM to yours. What do you think of his decision? And why has he made that?

It was a strange situation, first Linus ignores bugfixes by me and Alan for almost a year, then he complains we "didn't send" him the bugfixes and he replaces the VM of course. The new VM has better performance than the old VM for typical desktop systems ... but it fails horribly on more systems than the old VM. Redhat, for example, cannot ship the new VM in their distribution because it'll just fall apart for the database servers, some of their users run at least now my code is gone I no longer have to work together with Linus, which is a good thing ;)

Why is it a good thing?

With Linus out of the way, I can make a good VM. I no longer have to worry about what Linus likes or doesn't like. This is mostly important for intermediary code, where some of the "ingredients" to a VM are in place and others aren't yet in place. Such code can look ugly or pointless if you don't have the time to look at the design for a few days, so Linus tends to remove it ... even though it is needed to continue with development

The new VM has caused many developers' critics, that have seen in that so radical change the reason of an instability. Also your words have been very hard: "Look, the problem is that Linus is being an asshole and integrating conflicting ideas into both the VM and the VFS, without giving anybody prior notice and later blame others." Are you of the same mind?

Yes, though I guess I have to add that I have a lot of respect for Linus. He is a very user unfriendly source management system, but he is also very honest about it. One thing to fix this issue for me would be an automatic patch bot, a computer program to automatically resubmit patches to Linus. That way I can use Linus just as a source management program with intelligent feedback and I don't have to worry about having to re-send patches 50 times before they get into the kernel because that will be automatic ;)

I seem that there is not good blood between you lately, is there?

Actually I'm not holding a grudge or anything. The truth of the matter is that I'm just as stubborn as he is and I can't stand the way that "the Linus source control system" works. I suspect that once a patchbot is in place (a TCP-like system on top of the lossy Linus source control system) wèll both be much happier.

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