Day 2: Keynotes: Past, Present and Future of Linux

Tove, Linus' wife and their two girls where also there to enjoy the talk

• 2.2.11 came out the night before his talk, but as he explained, it's basically a handoff to Alan Cox, who maintains stable releases while Linus works on the unstable tree. The plan is for 2.2.11 is to last until 2.4 (famous last words ).
• Feature freeze, and code freeze in a couple of months hopefully with a release of 2.4 in december. As explained previously, like at the BALUG talk, the 2.1 tree lasted way too long so he doesn't want this to happen to the 2.3 branch
• 2.4 will have USB, I2O, careful resource allocation (for ISA PnP and PCMCIA)
• Capability levels for processes
• 2.4 will not have a journaling FS, although it can be added by vendors in 2.4 later.
• As for Merced, Hopefully 2.4 will be released before the Merced NDA is lifted, so no IA64 support in stock 2.4.
• Special kernel support for clustering will also have to wait for the next release.

• Firewire support is not very well documented and used yet, so it's a bit behind because of that.
• Maintainers are in charge of drivers, and he mainly cares about the core so he doesn't look too closely to driver code submitted to him. As for indentation and things like that, as long as he doesn't have to deal with the code to closely (like for drivers), it's ok but otherwise he will usually reject the patch.
• ACPI support is being worked on and it's more important than APM because of its better capabilities.
• As for devfs, he doesn't like the naming of the devices all that much but it's something he is looking at.
• Current scaling is up to 4-8 CPUs, but to go above like SGI is planning to do, it will probably be a different kernel.
• For DVDs, the main problem is the encryption and the secret algorithms involved. The solutions are full hardware decryption and a commercial software decoder. Both are currently being worked on.
• For realtime, the kernel is being improved to be a bit more deterministic, but without RT-Linux where Linux is merely a low level RT task it won't be hard realtime. Linus also says that many people who think they need hard realtime really don't.
• The ISDN code has been updated and the developers have now understood (after a few messages on the linux kernel list) that they need to provide patches more often and be better at staying in sync.
• For hotswap PCI, the problems are the same than what you face with ISA PnP and PCMCIA, so it's being taken care of at the same time. While hotswap PCI may not be in 2.4, the infrastructure will definitely be there.
• Rusty Russell asked about including kernel debugging patches. Linus, as it's well known, doesn't really like the idea of kernel debugging in the stock kernel as kernel debuggers may hide the real bug, and may lead to people fixing the bug improperly.
• The alsa sound drivers will hopefully be in 2.4, and if not in the next stable release.
• Linus is for kernel httpd support, as the current existing code is really clean and logical. It should be looked at on a case by case basis. Of course, inclusion in the kernel is not for much more complex things like the samba server.

RMS gave the usual GNU/Linux speech (i.e. because the basic unix utilities (including the file and binutils), as well as a non trivial piece, the C compiler, come from the GNU project, Richard is asking everyone to call Linux, GNU/Linux in order to give credit to GNU).
My personal take on this is that while the GNU project definitely deserves credit for offering a lot of the initial blocs that Linux is built on, someone found that only about 10% of SuSE Linux was based on such software, so many many other people deserve credit, the whole OSS community for that matter. Therefore insisting every single time that you should use GNU/Linux gets real old real fast... As far as I'm concerned RMS is more fun when he sings his "Join us now and share the software" song
If you feel you have to Email me to tell me how wrong you think I am, be my guess, but I won't take the time to answer, this is a well known subject that some people disagree on.

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