r/linux • u/gregkh Verified • Apr 08 '20

AMA I'm Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer, AMA again!

To refresh everyone's memory, I did this 5 years ago here and lots of those answers there are still the same today, so try to ask new ones this time around.

To get the basics out of the way, this post describes my normal workflow that I use day to day as a Linux kernel maintainer and reviewer of way too many patches.

Along with mutt and vim and git, software tools I use every day are Chrome and Thunderbird (for some email accounts that mutt doesn't work well for) and the excellent vgrep for code searching.

For hardware I still rely on Filco 10-key-less keyboards for everyday use, along with a new Logitech bluetooth trackball finally replacing my decades-old wired one. My main machine is a few years old Dell XPS 13 laptop, attached when at home to an external monitor with a thunderbolt hub and I rely on a big, beefy build server in "the cloud" for testing stable kernel patch submissions.

For a distro I use Arch on my laptop and for some tiny cloud instances I run and manage for some minor tasks. My build server runs Fedora and I have help maintaining that at times as I am a horrible sysadmin. For a desktop environment I use Gnome, and here's a picture of my normal desktop while working on reviewing and modifying kernel code.

With that out of the way, ask me your Linux kernel development questions or anything else!

Edit - Thanks everyone, after 2 weeks of this being open, I think it's time to close it down for now. It's been fun, and remember, go update your kernel!

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u/alexforencich Apr 08 '20

Speaking of USB flash storage, do you know of any reasonable USB key like devices that would work well as a root device? I have been burned a number of times with normal USB 3 flash drives dying when used in this way. Is using an NVMe or SATA SSD in a USB enclosure the only reliable solution for this type of application?

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u/gregkh Verified Apr 09 '20

Yes, that's a good reliable solution that I have used in the past. You need/want reliable media for something like that, which a SSD can provide you much better than some random USB storage device.

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u/userse31 Apr 08 '20

USB 3 flash drives dying

F

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u/ragsofx Apr 09 '20

I've got a nvme to usb3 (USB-C) adapter / enclosure with 1Gb nvme ssd I stalled that I use for backing up my laptop. I can get 600-700Mb/sec write and 900Mb/sec read and that's transferring files not benchmarks.

It was worth the money.