Smolt

» see smolt.fedoraproject.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Smolt arrived with Fedora 7 on 31 May 2007, credited to Mike McGrath, and it did one thing. It read your hardware and showed you the list, then asked whether you wanted to send it to a server. The submission was opt-in and anonymous, and it did not quietly run again afterward. If you said yes, your machine became one row in a public count of what Linux was actually installed on.

The reason anyone wanted this is unglamorous and important. Distributions ship drivers for hardware they cannot see. Without numbers, the decision about which wireless chipset to prioritize or which graphics card regression to treat as urgent comes down to whoever complains loudest on a mailing list. Smolt was an attempt to replace the loudest complainer with a table.

It spread past Fedora quickly. openSUSE carried it from release 11.1 through 12.2, Gentoo packaged it, MythTV shipped it to people building television boxes, and Red Hat and CentOS installs fed the same server. For a few years the Smolt database was the closest thing the Linux world had to a census, and people cited it in arguments the way you cite any number that exists when no better number does.

In those same years my own hardware list lived in a forum signature. On frmtr you typed out the motherboard and the processor by hand underneath every post you made, and you edited it when something changed, and the whole point was that other people could read what you were running. Smolt was that instinct with a database behind it instead of a signature field. I never sent one in, but I recognized the impulse immediately.

~ the record ~

~ what the census asked ~

The submission produced a public profile page with a unique identifier, so your machine had an address and you could look at your own entry. That was the small piece of showmanship holding the whole thing together, because a pure data upload with nothing coming back is a chore, and a page you can point at is a reason to do it.

The data itself was plain: devices, buses, kernel version, the ordinary contents of a system report. No filenames and no user identity, which mattered enormously to the audience being asked. Fedora users in 2007 were a population that read the source of anything before running it, and Smolt survived that reading, which is more than most telemetry has managed since.

~ why opt-in numbers lie ~

Here is the problem the project could never get out of. Everyone who appears in an opt-in hardware census chose to appear, and choosing to appear correlates with exactly the things you were hoping to measure past. The people who tick yes are the people who read release notes and run the newest version, and they tend to own newer hardware than the median install.

So the table said one thing and the install base was another, and the retirement document says so directly: the data was limited and could not reliably represent what was out there. Everybody involved understood this from early on. The awkward part is that a skewed number is still the only number in the room, and it gets quoted as if it were not skewed, which is arguably worse than having no census at all.

~ the placeholder year ~

The end was administrative rather than dramatic. Requirements gathering started on 11 September 2012 and the retirement was announced on 9 October. The reasons listed are the honest inventory of an unloved service: no upstream commit in over ten months, reporting scripts broken under RHEL 6, library dependencies needing constant patching, and a database whose nightly maintenance took the web server down every day.

On 21 November 2012 the server was replaced with a placeholder, and that is the real date the census stopped. The placeholder then sat there for almost a year while somebody watched how much traffic still hit it, and the machine finally came down on 1 November 2013. Twelve months of a tombstone politely answering requests from scripts that had not been told yet.

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