LWN.net

Last updated
LWN
LWN.net (logo).png
LWN net screenshot.png
A screenshot of LWN.net
Type of site
 Online newspaper
Available inEnglish
Created byJonathan Corbet and Elizabeth Coolbaugh
Revenue Subscription, Advertisement
URL lwn.net
RegistrationOptional
Users Over 100,000[ when? ]
LaunchedJanuary 29, 1998;26 years ago (1998-01-29) [1]
Current statusOnline
Written in Python [2]

LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to every story. Most news published daily are short summaries of articles published elsewhere, and are free to all viewers. Original articles are usually published weekly on Thursdays and are available only to subscribers for two weeks, after which they become free as well. LWN.net is part of Eklektix, Inc.

Contents

LWN caters to a more technical audience than other Linux/free software publications. It is often praised for its in-depth coverage of Linux kernel internals and Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) discussions. [3] [4] [5]

The acronym "LWN" originally stood for Linux Weekly News; that name is no longer used because the site no longer covers exclusively Linux-related topics, and it has daily as well as weekly content. [6]

History

Jonathan Corbet at LinuxCon Japan (2010) Jon Corbet.jpg
Jonathan Corbet at LinuxCon Japan (2010)

Founded by Jonathan Corbet and Elizabeth Coolbaugh and published since January 1998, [1] LWN was originally a free site devoted to collecting Linux news, published weekly.

In 2000, Tucows acquired Linux Weekly News [7] (which was then "unacquired" in 2002 [8] ).

At the end of May 2002, LWN announced a redesigned site. [9] Among the changes was a facility for readers to post comments about stories.

On July 25, 2002, LWN announced that due to its inability to raise enough funds through donations, the following issue would be its last. [10] [11] Following an outpouring of support from readers, the editors of LWN decided to continue publishing, albeit with a subscription model. New weekly editions of LWN are initially only available to readers who subscribe at one of three levels (group subscriptions are also available). After a 2-weeks delay, each issue becomes freely available to readers who are unable or unwilling to pay. [12]

Contributors

LWN.net staff, as of April 2024, consists of: [13]

LWN.net also purchases a number of articles from freelance authors. [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It is a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++. It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.

Tucows Inc. is an American-Canadian publicly traded Internet services and telecommunications company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and incorporated in Pennsylvania, United States. The company is composed of three independent businesses: Tucows Domains, Ting Internet, and Wavelo.

Video4Linux is a collection of device drivers and an API for supporting realtime video capture on Linux systems. It supports many USB webcams, TV tuners, and related devices, standardizing their output, so programmers can easily add video support to their applications.

The Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) is the main electronic mailing list for Linux kernel development, where the majority of the announcements, discussions, debates, and flame wars over the kernel take place. Many other mailing lists exist to discuss the different subsystems and ports of the Linux kernel, but LKML is the principal communication channel among Linux kernel developers. It is a very high-volume list, usually receiving about 1,000 messages each day, most of which are kernel code patches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OSNews</span>

OSNews is a computing online newspaper. It originally focused on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997, but is now aggregating consumer electronics news. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner. As of 2014, its managing editor is Thom Holwerda, who joined in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David S. Miller</span> American software programmer

David Stephen Miller is an American software developer working on the Linux kernel, where he is the primary maintainer of the networking subsystem and individual networking drivers, the SPARC implementation, and the IDE subsystem. With other people, he co-maintains the crypto API, KProbes, IPsec, and is also involved in other development work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux kernel interfaces</span> An overview and comparison of the Linux kernel API and ABI.

The Linux kernel provides multiple interfaces to user-space and kernel-mode code that are used for varying purposes and that have varying properties by design. There are two types of application programming interface (API) in the Linux kernel:

  1. the "kernel–user space" API; and
  2. the "kernel internal" API.

The device mapper is a framework provided by the Linux kernel for mapping physical block devices onto higher-level virtual block devices. It forms the foundation of the logical volume manager (LVM), software RAIDs and dm-crypt disk encryption, and offers additional features such as file system snapshots.

<i>Micro Mart</i> British computer magazine

Micro Mart was a weekly computer magazine published in the United Kingdom by Dennis Publishing Ltd. As of 2015, it had a circulation of 5,422. In a letter to subscribers in December 2016 it was announced that the magazine would cease publication with issue No 1445 : "After 30 amazing years of telling it like it is, Micro Mart magazine is logging off."

GNU variants are operating systems based upon the GNU operating system. According to the GNU project and others, these also include most operating systems using the Linux kernel and a few others using BSD-based kernels.

Con Kolivas is a Greek-Australian anaesthetist. He has worked as a computer programmer on the Linux kernel and on the development of the cryptographic currency mining software CGMiner. His Linux contributions include patches for the kernel to improve its desktop performance, particularly reducing I/O impact.

Lguest is a Linux kernel x86 virtualization hypervisor introduced in kernel version 2.6.23 and removed in kernel version 4.14. The hypervisor is an operating-system-level virtualization system capable of running unmodified 32-bit x86 Linux kernels as guest machines. Installation is as easy as running modprobe lg followed by tools/lguest/lguest to create a new guest.

The Common Public Attribution License ("CPAL") is a free software license approved by the Open Source Initiative in 2007. Its purpose is to be a general license for software distributed over a network. It is based on the Mozilla Public License, but it adds an attribution term paraphrased below:

[…] the Original Developer may include […] a requirement that each time an Executable and Source Code or a Larger Work is launched or initially run […] a prominent display of the Original Developer's Attribution Information […] must occur on the graphic user interface employed by the end user to access such Covered Code […]

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux kernel</span> Free Unix-like operating system kernel

The Linux kernel is a free and open source, UNIX-like kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system (OS) which was created to be a free replacement for Unix. Since the late 1990s, it has been included in many operating system distributions, many of which are called Linux. One such Linux kernel operating system is Android which is used in many mobile and embedded devices.

In computing, klibc is a minimalistic subset of the standard C library developed by H. Peter Anvin. It was developed mainly to be used during the Linux startup process, and it is part of the early user space, i.e. components used during kernel startup, but which do not run in kernel mode. These components do not have access to the standard library used by normal userspace programs.

cgroups is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage of a collection of processes.

kGraft is a feature of the Linux kernel that implements live patching of a running kernel, which allows kernel patches to be applied while the kernel is still running. By avoiding the need for rebooting the system with a new kernel that contains the desired patches, kGraft aims to maximize the system uptime and availability. At the same time, kGraft allows kernel-related security updates to be applied without deferring them to scheduled downtimes. Internally, kGraft allows entire functions in a running kernel to be replaced with their patched versions, doing that safely by selectively using original versions of functions to ensure per-process consistency while the live patching is performed.

kpatch is a feature of the Linux kernel that implements live patching of a running kernel, which allows kernel patches to be applied while the kernel is still running. By avoiding the need for rebooting the system with a new kernel that contains the desired patches, kpatch aims to maximize the system uptime and availability. At the same time, kpatch allows kernel-related security updates to be applied without deferring them to scheduled downtimes. Internally, kpatch allows entire functions in a running kernel to be replaced with their patched versions, doing that safely by stopping all running processes while the live patching is performed.

io_uring is a Linux kernel system call interface for storage device asynchronous I/O operations addressing performance issues with similar interfaces provided by functions like read /write or aio_read /aio_write etc. for operations on data accessed by file descriptors.

References

  1. 1 2 "Leading items". LWN.net. Our first announced issue was January 29, 1998
  2. ↑ "The LWN.net FAQ: Site code questions" . Retrieved 2019-07-10.
  3. ↑ Mel Gorman (2004). Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager. Prentice Hall. ISBN   9780131453487.
  4. ↑ Masters, Jon; Blum, Richard (2007). Professional Linux Programming. John Wiley & Sons. p. 216. ISBN   9780470149492.
  5. ↑ Love, Robert (2010). Linux Kernel Development. Pearson Education. p. 409. ISBN   9780672329463.
  6. ↑ "The LWN.net FAQ: General questions" . Retrieved 2012-08-06.
  7. ↑ Corbet, Jonathan (2008-01-16). "Ten-year timeline, part 2: the bubble days". Linux Weekly News. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
  8. ↑ Corbet, Jonathan (2008-01-23). "Ten-year timeline part 3: The Tucows years". Linux Weekly News. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  9. ↑ Corbet, Jonathan (2002-05-31). "Welcome to the new LWN.net!". LWN.net.
  10. ↑ Corbet, Jonathan (2002-07-24). "The end of the road". LWN.net.
  11. ↑ Stephen Shankland (2002-07-25). "Linux publication to close". CNET News.
  12. ↑ "Writing for LWN". LWN.net. ...during the LWN subscription period - currently up to two weeks after publication.
  13. ↑ "The LWN.net FAQ: Content questions" . Retrieved 2024-04-11.
  14. ↑ "The LWN.net FAQ: Content questions" . Retrieved 2023-02-06.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.