Lennart Poettering | |
|---|---|
 Poettering in December 2012 | |
| Born | 15 October 1980 |
| Nationality | German |
| Occupation | Software engineer |
| Employer | Microsoft |
| Known for | Avahi, PulseAudio, systemd |
| Website | 0pointer |
Lennart Poettering (born 15 October 1980) is a German software engineer working for Microsoft and the original author of PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd.
Poettering was born in Guatemala City but grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Hamburg, Germany. [1] Poettering worked for Red Hat from 2008 to 2022. [2] [3] He then joined Microsoft. [4] [5] [6] [7]
Since 2003, Poettering has worked on more than 40 projects, mostly written in C. He is the developer and maintainer of several free software projects which have been widely adopted by Linux distributions, including PulseAudio sound server (2004), [2] [8] Avahi zeroconf implementation [9] [10] (2005), and systemd init system (2010). [11]
Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the Linux ecosystem. [12] [13] [14]
His style has brought accusations that he is working against long-standing Unix philosophy, [15] which he addressed in his blog post The Biggest Myths. [16] For instance, Poettering has advocated speeding up Linux development at the expense of breaking compatibility with POSIX and other Unix-like operating systems such as the BSDs. [17] [18] He took this position because of his experience in writing some other low-level components in the desktop stack. [12] He invites other developers to do the same. [19] Poettering recommends also reading The Linux Programming Interface but ignoring the POSIX-specific parts. [13]
In 2011 Poettering, one of the main developers of PulseAudio, praised the Windows and macOS audio stacks as "more advanced" and called Open Sound System "a simplistic 90's style audio stack" without relevance for a modern desktop. [13]
Also in 2011, when asked why the Linux desktop hadn't been widely adopted by mainstream users, he answered that: "Linux is still too fragmented...[and] needs to be streamlined...". [20] In 2014 Poettering published an essay criticising how software in Linux distros is commonly packaged, updated, and deployed; and laid out proposals that he, Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen and David Herrmann, had for how the architecture should be changed. [21]
The controversy around systemd culminated in personal attacks and alleged death threats against Poettering. [22] [23] Poettering went on to put some blame on Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers for being bad role models for encouraging an abusive discussion culture on technical disagreements. [22] [24]
In 2017, Poettering received the Pwnie Award for Lamest Vendor Response to vulnerabilities reported in systemd. [25]
The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls. The term also sometimes refers to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; it can be thought of as a device driver for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow the writing of sound-based applications that are agnostic of the underlying sound hardware.
freedesktop.org (fd.o), formerly X Desktop Group (XDG), is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Although freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, it is not a formal standards body.
Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.
A sound server is software that manages the use of and access to audio devices. It commonly runs as a background process.
udev is a device manager for the Linux kernel. As the successor of devfsd and hotplug, udev primarily manages device nodes in the /dev directory. At the same time, udev also handles all user space events raised when hardware devices are added into the system or removed from it, including firmware loading as required by certain devices.
D-Bus is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, initiated by GNOME developer Havoc Pennington to standardize services provided by Linux desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE.
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:
NetworkManager is a daemon that sits on top of libudev and other Linux kernel interfaces and provides a high-level interface for the configuration of the network interfaces.
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.
Upstart is a discontinued event-based replacement for the traditional init daemon—the method by which several Unix-like computer operating systems perform tasks when the computer is started. It was written by Scott James Remnant, a former employee of Canonical Ltd. In 2014, Upstart was placed in maintenance mode, and other init daemons, such as systemd, were recommended in place of Upstart. Ubuntu moved away from Upstart with the release of version 15.04 in favor of migrating to systemd. As of March 2023, there have been no updates released for Upstart since September 2014.
The multi-stage booting process of Linux is in many ways similar to the BSD and other Unix-style boot processes, from which it derives.
Calculate Linux is a Linux distribution optimized for fast deployment in an organization environment. It is based on the Gentoo Linux project and includes many preconfigured functions.
systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. The main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its primary component is a "system and service manager" – an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes. It also provides replacements for various daemons and utilities, including device management, login management, network connection management, and event logging. The name systemd adheres to the Unix convention of naming daemons by appending the letter d. It also plays on the term "System D", which refers to a person's ability to adapt quickly and improvise to solve problems.
Criticism of desktop Linux is a history of comment on the perceived shortcomings of the Linux operating system when installed on desktop computers. These criticisms have been aimed at the plethora of issues and lack of consistency between Linux distributions, their usefulness and ease of use as desktop systems for general end users, driver support and issues with multi-media playback and audio development.
Devuan is a fork of the Debian Linux distribution that uses sysvinit, runit or OpenRC instead of systemd. Devuan aims to avoid "lock-in" by projects like systemd and aims to maintain compatibility with other init systems to avoid detaching Linux from other Unix systems.
Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel and the systemd init system. The packages, called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users. Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system. Snap was originally released for cloud applications but was later ported to also work for Internet of Things devices and desktop applications.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of Windows that allows developers to run a Linux environment without the need for a separate virtual machine or dual booting. There are two versions of WSL: WSL 1 and WSL 2. WSL 1 was first released on August 2, 2016, and acts as a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables by implementing Linux system calls on the Windows kernel. It is available on Windows 10, Windows 10 LTSB/LTSC, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022.
casync is a Linux software utility designed to distribute frequently-updated file system images over the Internet.
Genode is a free and open-source software operating system (OS) framework consisting of a microkernel abstraction layer and a set of user space components. The framework is notable as one of the few open-source operating systems not derived from a proprietary OS, such as Unix. The characteristic design philosophy is that a small trusted computing base is of primary concern in a security-oriented OS.
Many of my previous projects (including PulseAudio and Avahi) have been written to be portable. Being relieved from the chains that the requirement for portability puts on you is quite liberating. While ensuring portability when working on high-level applications is not necessarily a difficult job it becomes increasingly more difficult if the stuff you work on is a system component (which systemd, PulseAudio and Avahi are).
we still can't fully match competing audio stacks like CoreAudio [...] Both Windows and macOS have much better integrated audio stacks than we have. [...] in general the CoreAudio stack is definitely more advanced than ours. [...] there's no doubt that it [the Windows audio stack] is probably still a better integrated audio hacking experience to develop for Windows. [...] OSS is a simplistic 90's style audio stack. I doesn't really have any relevance for what you need for a modern desktop.
POSIX is really an encapsulation of some choices that various Unix systems made along the way, rather than a body of text that got standardized and then implemented. According to Poettering, Linux should use its position as "market leader" (in the market of free Unix-like operating systems) and try out some new things. If developers don't force themselves into the constraints of the POSIX API, they could develop some really innovative software, like systemd shows. When these new developments happen to turn out really interesting, other operating systems could eventually adopt them as well.
Not having to care about portability has two big advantages: we can make maximum use of what the modern Linux kernel offers these days without headaches -- Linux is one of the most powerful kernels in existence, but many of its features have not been used by the previous solutions. And secondly, it greatly simplifies our code and makes it shorter: since we never need to abstract OS interfaces the amount of glue code is minimal, and hence what we gain is a smaller chance to create bugs, a smaller chance of confusing the reader of the code (hence better maintainability) and a smaller footprint.
In fact, the way I see things the Linux API has been taking the role of the POSIX API and Linux is the focal point of all Free Software development. Due to that I can only recommend developers to try to hack with only Linux in mind and experience the freedom and the opportunities this offers you. So, get yourself a copy of The Linux Programming Interface, ignore everything it says about POSIX compatibility and hack away your amazing Linux software. It's quite relieving!
I think we weren't innovative enough in the interface, and we didn't have a convincing message and clear platform. If you accept MacOS as benchmark for user interfaces, then we weren't really matching it, at best copying it. I think this is changing now, with GNOME 3 which is a big step forward as an interface for Linux and for the first time is something that has been strictly designed under UI design guidelines. So we now have a better interface, leaves the message and the clear platform. Linux is still too fragmented, and a developer targeting Linux will have to choose from a variety of APIs, a bazaar of somewhat matching but mostly just chaotic choices that will work on some systems but not on others. I think it would be in our greatest interest to streamline the platform top to bottom, and thus have a clear message what the Linux OS is. And of course, I believe my work in cleaning up the lower levels of our userspace stack is helping to work in that direction. Getting a clear message out what Linux is supposed to be is definitely a social issue, but to make that happen the Linux platform needs to be streamlined first, and that's a technical task, and not done yet.
Media related to Lennart Poettering at Wikimedia Commons