From The Linux Foundation
Welcome to the Linux Weather Forecast. This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distros sometime in the near future. Your "chief meteorologist" is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments to the Discussion page.
There's a blog that reports on the main changes to the forecast. You can view it directly or use a feed reader to subscribe to the blog feed. You can also subscribe directly to the changes feed for this page to see feed all forecast edits.
Forecast summaries
Current conditions: the current kernel release is 2.6.25 (April 16). Some of the features in this kernel include:
- Much improved system memory use profiling
- The SMACK security module
- The first free AMD/ATI graphics driver, along with the beginnings of kernel modesetting support for Intel and some ATI chipsets
- A number of ext4 filesystem enhancements
- The controller area network (CAN) protocol
- A memory usage controller intended for use with containers
- Support for the MN10300 architecture
- Thermal regulation support, intended for embedded applications where the temperature of the device must be kept under control for hardware safety and user comfort.
- The ath5k driver, providing support for Atheros wireless chipsets
- A number of realtime scheduling improvements, including realtime group scheduling
- LatencyTop support
See the KernelNewbies.org 2.6.25 page for a vast amount of detail about this release.
Some statistics: over 12,000 individual changesets were merged into the mainline during the 2.6.25 development cycle. These came from almost 1200 developers representing over 150 companies. Almost 370,000 lines of code were added during this cycle, and many more modified. It is an amazing amount of work, even by kernel standards. See this article for more detailed statistics for 2.6.25.
Short-term forecast: 2.6.26 can be expected in late June or (more likely) early July, 2008. Linus Torvalds closed the merge window and released 2.6.26-rc1 on May 3. Some of the more interesting features in the release will include:
- KGDB, an interactive kernel debugger, is finally available for the x86 architecture despite Linus Torvalds's longstanding objections to this kind of tool.
- Mesh networking support has been added to the mac80211 wireless stack. This code is in an early state and probably will not be ready for general use in the 2.6.26 release.
- At long last, the kernel has page attribute table (PAT) support on the x86 architecture.
- Linux now has support for braille screen readers.
- Quite a bit of virtualization and container work has been done. KVM now supports the S/390, PowerPC 440, and IA-64 architectures. Xen's "balloon driver" (which allows control of the memory resources given to virtualized guests) has been merged.
- Per-process securebits - a useful tool for those who would like to push Linux in the direction of a fully capability-based system.
The 2.6.26 merge process has barely begun; the merge window will probably stay open into early May. Check back for updates as more code goes into the mainline.
Climatological timeframes (i.e., post-2.6.26):
- Real-time preemption - preemptible spinlocks
- Ext4
- utrace
- Built-in support for kernel debugging with KGDB
- Syslets
Weather events that may never occur:
Specific areas of interest
The forecast has been divided into a number of specific subject areas.
- Core kernel developments: schedulers, real-time support, event management, and memory management.
- Virtualization and containers: Xen, KVM, control groups, etc.
- Filesystems: ext4, btrfs, and other ways of storing data.
- Security: technologies and enhancements for keeping Linux systems secure.
- Networking: Network channels and other technologies for connecting systems together.
- Hardware support: Topics of interest in hardware support.
- Miscellaneous topics which do not fit under any other heading.
- User space: user-space code which forms an important part of the low-level platform.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.