Christian Hammond: Sentience discovered in the Linux kernel

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:27:28 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, after much experimentation, I have made a remarkable discovery. Perhaps the very first case of a sentient AI has been discovered, sitting right under our noses, in the Linux Kernel. With such a complicated codebase that has evolved greatly over the years, there are certainly more surprising places for it to spring up, but it’s still quite unexpected.

And where, specifically, has this sentience manifested itself? The suspend/resume code.

See now, like many of you, I’ve dealt with the instabilities of suspend/resume. I’ve considered it to just be buggy, unreliable, and possibly incompatible with my hardware. That is, until I realized that there’s a pattern. One that began to make a sort of sense.

A couple months back, I gave suspend/resume another shot, and to my surprise it worked. I figured that Ubuntu 10.04 finally fixed it, but it still wasn’t perfect. I still noticed problems.

The first thing I noticed was that when I unsuspended at work, I couldn’t use my volume keys. Everything else was fine, but my laptop’s volume keys didn’t register as a key press on anything. If I suspended again and brought it back home, the keys would work fine. If I suspended at home and resumed at home, I wouldn’t have the volume key problem. Weird, but just buggy, right?

It was a couple weekends ago when I suspended my laptop to take it somewhere. It wouldn’t suspend at all. Just hard-locked. This continued until the week, when it worked again. Last weekend? Same problem, couldn’t suspend. Monday, it worked fine.

It was then that I realized suspend/resume was breaking deliberately! See, my laptop feels more comfortable at home, less so at work but it tolerates it (with some complaining), but absolutely doesn’t want to leave during the weekend. It’s like a cat that just wants to be in a familiar environment, selfishly vying for your attention through mischievous acts. Look at it hard enough and the pattern emerges. It’s undeniable.

That got me thinking. What other possible instances of AI have we been misconstruing as bugs or random glitches? All those inter-connected street lights that occasionally shut off as you walk underneath them? Maybe they’re just shy, or they hate you. Maybe NES cartridges just found being blown stimulating.

So remember guys. Windows suspend/resume may work just fine. Mac too. But Linux’s suspend/resume isn’t a buggy pile of crap. It’s an intelligent buggy pile of crap, that just wants to be loved.

J. Paul Reed: If You [Can't] Build It, They Will [Still] Come

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:25:53 +0000

Slashdot ran a Your Rights Online post a couple months ago posing the question “Do Build Environments Give Companies an End Run Around the GPL?”

The upshot: are companies¹ basing their device firmwares on Linux breaking the GPL by posting only their source code, but omitting details² regarding the environment required to to build that firmware, much less flash a device with these customized firmware.

It’s certainly an interesting question.

Ask any developer and they probably wouldn’t consider the build environment as at all related to GPL-compliance requirements. That’s likely because the vast majority of open source software builds on any standard GNU/Linux machine³; the context of “GPL-compliance” is version 2 of the GPL, released in 1991, when Linux-using embedded devices wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

But as embedded and mobile consumer electronics companies have leveraged the wealth of open source software to bring products to market quickly, this has become a very real issue, and the keepers of the GPL, the Free Software Foundation, have realized that could be a problem.

One of the main issues is “tivoization“, named after the obvious reference after they disallowed the execution of firmware containing modifications on their hardware. Such behavior is specifically restricted in version 3 of the GPL.

In the latest version of the GPL, this behavior was specifically called out as a allowable use of the end user and/or developer.

This problem doesn’t just affect embedded devices.

A common starting point for an open source hacker poking at these types of products it to try to reproduce what a company ships to its users⁴. But these days, that may not even be possible in software.

Mozilla Corporation, for example, now builds some of its builds with profile guided optimizations. This requires building Firefox, running it in an instrumented fashion, and using that data to guide the optimization of hot spots.

To provide a good, real world set of runtime data, Mozilla tests with a static page set of about 200 websites on the web. But it can’t release this archived content—now used in the build process—due to copyright restrictions.

So, even though open source developers are building Firefox on Win32, it won’t match what Mozilla Corporation actually ships to millions of users⁵.

To be sure, the issue of build systems, specifically, involves a very narrow interpretation of the GPL. Even in the cases the GPLv3 specifically addresses, there isn’t broad agreement among open source developers that such use should be disallowed⁷.

It may be annoying to open source hackers to be unable to fully experiment with custom firmwares their shiny new embedded, consumer product whiz-bang device.

It may take more time to reverse engineer how to flash these devices⁸ to get firmwares on them.

This sort of “freedom” may require a tradeoff in terms of enjoyment or functionality of these devices as manufacturers move more functionality into service offerings in the cloud, they can refuse access by these custom firmwares¹⁰.

But up to now, users have voted with their dollars and download clicks: they don’t care.

Most open source developers apparently don’t either.

_______________
¹ who have the resources, but not the resolve
² Either images or documentation
³ The venerable ./configure && make && make install triad
⁴ The so-called identity proof
⁵ To be fair, I cite Firefox as an example of this problem because it’s one I’m familiar with; Mozilla requires probably one of the most complex open source build environments around, and they’ve done a good job of, especially, documenting their build environments to the extent possible⁶ and making it easier to build on Win32.
⁶ Something I have no qualms asserting a large chunk of responsibility for having made happen
⁷ Linus Torvalds, for one, has stated that he doesn’t consider such restrictions on the use of the hardware to be a problem
⁸ And make no mistake, there are open source hackers out there, that totally get off on that sort of stuff, so they will find a way to do it⁹
⁹ Even if it nets them a few bricked devices
¹⁰ As Sony has done with its “Other Operating System” feature, and now routinely does with the Playstation Network and PS3 updates

Planet Tacobeam

Christian Hammond: Sentience discovered in the Linux kernel

J. Paul Reed: If You [Can't] Build It, They Will [Still] Come