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60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

eighty-twenty.org

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Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#71

Post by matheusmoreira »

junon wrote: post #2

Yet another case of GPL virality causing more issues than it solves. E: Downvoters, have you read the article? The program started a new process for each address lookup instead of using a library because that library is GPL. Shall we have a discussion?

The root cause is copyright. If it were to be abolished, no one would ever have to think about licensing ever again. None of this pain would exist.

Think about all the time that would be saved when people no longer need to think about all this lawyer bullshit.

Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#72

Post by pphysch »

captainmuon wrote: post #26
faho wrote: post #3

> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.

If we are nitpicking, they can , there is nothing material stopping them. It is "just" at odds with copyright law. In a society with different laws, there would be no problem. I wonder what would be greater - the productivity gain when we would not have to make workarounds due to licensing, and when we could just legally access the source code of everything. Or the loss, because people might have less incentive to in…

If only we were permitted to view the digital IP rights tyranny as another disruptable industry with latent energy that could be unlocked by a savvy founder...

The economic activity & value directly suppressed by IPR is unbelievable. Hard to even mentally scratch the surface. It's extremely economical (for society) to digitally copy and distribute useful information.

Most Western IP laws are draconic in the purest sense of the word.

Unfortunately their is a very influential sect of "corporate-law fearing" IP fanatics at the heart of many FOSS tech traditions (RMS, et al). Not all of it is pragmatic.

Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#74

Post by anticristi »

faho wrote: post #3

> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.

Kind of ironic that RMS campained against proprietary software to allow reuse of code. Now we have two islands of open source code ... .

Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#75

Post by TillE »

lathiat wrote: post #46
ziml77 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or is the incompatibility especially absurd given that perf is currently using libbfd, just 1 step removed via addr2line? I wonder if a patch to addr2line would be accepted which allows the executable to stay running to accept multiple requests through stdin.

This is kind of the crux of a long history of these licensing arguments. That dynamic linking is problematic because it potentially creates a derived work. And then you might distribute that derived work. But shelling out to something or in some cases having an automated script create or download the derived work automatically is sometimes acceptable. It’s a bit of a silly line in some ways. But it’s a long story.

I'm skeptical that there's a coherent legal distinction to be drawn between using a dynamic library with dlopen etc and running a similar executable with arguments. It's functionally identical usage of some public interface.

Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#76

Post by junon »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #71
junon wrote: post #2

Yet another case of GPL virality causing more issues than it solves. E: Downvoters, have you read the article? The program started a new process for each address lookup instead of using a library because that library is GPL. Shall we have a discussion?

The root cause is copyright. If it were to be abolished, no one would ever have to think about licensing ever again. None of this pain would exist. Think about all the time that would be saved when people no longer need to think about all this lawyer bullshit.

Not sure if this is a pisstake on my argument, but a world without copyright (or something similar) would be a world of endless exploitation and stifled innovation.

Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#78

Post by [deleted] »

faho wrote: post #3

> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.

[deleted]

Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#79

Post by dharmab »

faho wrote: post #56
saagarjha wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Clang using it for? I thought it had its own suite of that.

This... is some weirdness in Arch's clang package. It depends on gcc, for some reason, and that depends on binutils? (and I have no idea if anything here uses libbfd, since it's just a part of the binutils package and not split out)

Clang uses part of the host compiler toolchain; gcc is the default compiler on Arch included in the base package.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/38291698/4179075

Re: 60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

#80

Post by wizzwizz4 »

junon wrote: post #76
matheusmoreira wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root cause is copyright. If it were to be abolished, no one would ever have to think about licensing ever again. None of this pain would exist. Think about all the time that would be saved when people no longer need to think about all this lawyer bullshit.

Not sure if this is a pisstake on my argument, but a world without copyright (or something similar) would be a world of endless exploitation and stifled innovation.

Copyright as it exists today does an awful lot of exploitation-enabling and innovation-stifling in itself. (And that's ignoring the rest of the IP suite.)
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