Timely, the first new beta in years just came out. There's a lot more content to go before it's a complete game, but there's lot of fun to be had. Contributions welcome!
This is like the circle of life for startups, I swear. Next up will be "legal services for someone interfering with your disruptive business model as a service".
Most likely the fact that they’re running ancient kernel versions (RHEl 7.6, released Oct 30 2018 uses Linux 3.10, which was released in June 2013) , and have to support them for 10-20 years.
RHEL 6 uses kernel version 2.6.32, released in 2011, and will be supported until 2020.
With a moving target like Btrfs, which may have plenty of showstopper bugs left in it yet, it’s just not feasible to keep backporting these new features to a an old kernel version.
Once Btrfs stops getting major patches, and is considered stable, I guess it could eventually make its way back.
While true, there's also the fact that they don't have any btrfs engineers anymore (from what I've heard). The ones they had have all left for Facebook and other companies that use btrfs in production.
Redhat have added new filesystem support after a .0 release. For example, they added XFS to the kernel (without xfsprogs) in RHEL 5.2 and added the tools to the base repo in 5.4, then officially supported it in 5.6.
XFS is a conceptually simple journaling file system, comparing that to the crazy corner cases that can exist within btrfs snapshots and volumes and subvolumes and redundancy is not reasonable. A few years back btrfs had a lot of momentum, but other projects have matured since then and it just doesn't make as much sense as it used to. btrfs was meant to be ZFS without the license problems, but ZoL has gotten significantly better, and for some legal reasons that are fuzzy, Canonical now supports and ships ZoL in Ubuntu. lvm/dmraid performance has gotten better and integration with LVM and other software has improved, to the point that having a standardized interface for managing your storage (Like ZFS and BTRFS have) is no longer such a big deal.
Between lvm/dmraid and how much effort they've done to make it simple to use lvm storage for libvirt/openstack/etc., I see no reason why they'd ever support btrfs in RHEL. They would spend more in engineers than they would ever get back in support.
You are probably right in terms of dev and support overhead. I would imagine that should they decide to add it, the process would be similar to XFS; in that, they would add support for it in the kernel and call it "experimental" like they did with XFS in 5.2.
XFS is a fairly simple filesystem. That said, the issues they had were integrating it in VFS. There are still some bugs at that layer today, albeit minor ones. In 5.x, most of the issues were race conditions in VFS and raid controllers (sas bus resets and such). XFS itself is actually very mature but any time they add a new FS, the VFS layer requires a lot of work.
From reports I've read by insiders, it's mainly due to the fact that all the filesystem developers in RH are XFS-focused, and everybody who's XFS-focused isn't interested in learning enough btrfs to keep their end up-to-date. So when the last guy who did btrfs left, they were effectively forced to end their support for it.
Unfortunately, the First Amendment does not protect against private action, only government restraints on speech. Other mechanisms like anti-SLAPP laws might help with that, but either way that's a lot of legal effort to publish some benchmarks. Intel also operates all over the world, so they could eg. sue a Britain-based branch of some media outlet that also publishes the numbers if the laws there are more in their favor.
The First Amemdment itself doesn't directly apply to Intel, but there are a lot of relevant legal protections pertaining to the general idea of protecting the press. In particular, this seems to be fundamentally a copyright license that's at issue. News reporting, scholarship and research are all explicitly listed as purposes that can qualify as fair use. Using copyrighted material to research and report on the nature of defective goods being sold to the public strikes me as pretty likely to be ruled as fair use, especially when using the copyrighted microcode in a manner contrary to Intel's license is necessary to properly fact-check a news story about their processor flaws.
The license can't restrict third parties from sharing benchmarks, which is why it puts the onus on the user not to allow third parties to share them. If some news site was to publish benchmarks without disclosing the source, Intel would first have to take them to court to force them to disclose who provided said benchmarks. That's as far as I can see it directly impacting sites that don't run their own benchmarks. That said, the sites that do run their own benchmarks would be on the hook. Sadly, even if this is unenforceable, the potential legal battle to have it declared so would be scary enough to quash some criticism.
This really makes me doubt if I should buy Intel products in the future (to the extent that I have a choice). If I can't get performance information because Intel has something to hide, I'll have to look elsewhere. Really, this is sufficiently distasteful behavior to make me avoid Intel even if the products work just fine.
This becomes doubly interesting once those users are in a different jurisdiction. I highly doubt a EU court would be willing to uphold such a bullshit term for a US company. Especially since many EU countries have quite strong laws against unexpected/unreasonable licensing terms.
> Sadly, even if this is unenforceable, the potential legal battle to have it declared so would be scary enough to quash some criticism.
I have seen this happen in so many cases all over the world. Supreme Court orders can be ignored by the government agencies and even private parties as long as no one drags them to court. Spending a 100 million dollars is nothing for the government or influential private parties as big as Intel. The small guy, however, will be bankrupted.
Be it the government or the big corporate, it is effectively the public money being used against the public. How absurd.
This shows that money is necessary for justice. This is dangerous.
Why can we not have systems that detect such frauds and automatically discipline such entities? It is not like such violations are happening behind closed doors of a small house in an inaccessible jungle. These violations are public.
I see it as a step towards integrating more (or in this case better IMO) things into their ecosystem. Consolidating Hipchat with Slack is a step toward that.
I think the classic in this from is "cryptonomicon" by neal stephenson. This got me thinking about the implications of secure anonymous transactions years ago, well before any general public knowlegde of blockchain/bitcoin type concepts.
What is the role goverment is they can't tax people/companies? How does a government fulfill that role if they can't raise money?
True. REAMDE (same author) is more on the nose, but I also didn't enjoy it as much as a book. Really, Neal Stephenson just doesn't do books with only one major focus.
