Every January, “Linux Magazine” surveys the state of the Linux kernel, bringing their readers up to date on what new kernel features and improvements to expect in the year ahead. “For 2002, the crystal ball is cloudier than usual because at press time, work on Linux 2.5 has not yet begun. Nevertheless, some definite and tentative plans had come to light” the editor writes. The magazine spoke with several key kernel developers to learn more about their plans and hopes for Linux 2.5. This article was first appeared in the printed version of the magazine in December, and it is now online, free for everyone to access it.
The State of the Linux Kernel
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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By November, Cox had stepped down as maintainer of the stable 2.4 kernel release (he says, “the VM had nothing to do with the decision”) and the 2.5 kernel had still not appeared.
There’s an Alan Cox working on the FreeBSD kernel. I see regularily CVS commits by him. Might it be that Alan Cox?
If it is, that would be great.
I don’t believe it is though….I think the “Linux” AC works for Redhat.
“Asynchronous I/O, called “the Holy Grail of performance” by kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti, is one of the most eagerly anticipated developments for the new kernel. It allows kernel developers to write code that initiates an input/ output operation but continues to execute while the operation is performed. ”
Linux can’t do this?? Oh dear. I had software that did async I/O years ago on the Amiga… makes you wonder…
Well, just my two cents. In order for Linux to become a truely usable operating system in my book, there are still two things that need to be done. One is the VM system, which was mentioned. But the other is a better performing and more stable process scheduler. 2.4 made improvements in this area, but it still isn’t good enough.
makes you wonder what?
it was a echnology that was not needed before in the linux kernel. I mean, for most of Linux’s life, it has been Command line driven. Gnome and KDE did not come out for it until 1997ish. desktop linux has not been scean as that major of a thing until these last 2 years, and multimedia has not been that major of a push for the last few years also.
the fact that it is final moving to async i/o just shows that Linux is moving into new areas that require such abilities. I mean, do you realy need a premtable kernel to serve up FTP or apache( need, not whether it would help) or coding?
well, the VM is stable and robust, so they should not have issues with that in 2.5/2.6, and now that they have added the prempt patch to the official kernel, the scheduling should improve.
Under MAC, the system — not the user — decides who specifically is allowed to access data. This prevents users from inappropriately publishing sensitive data.
I know that this is only in the SELinux version, but it Sure would have been nice if the FBI had this feature 🙂 (if you had payed attention to the news over the last week, you will know what I mean)
AsyncI/O is useful in a whole range of circumstances (for example encryption, compresion and other activities where data can be read in blocks for processing) but I take your point. Still, for a server OS it strikes me as unusual that this wasn’t implemented along time ago. I guess it also depends on how CPU bound the I/O is, though DMA disk access has been around a while now).