New Kernel 2.4 Development Branch (-mjc)

Ivo writes: "kerneltrap is reporting: Michael Cohen announced to the lkml his intention to begin a new 2.4 development tree. The first release of his -mjc branch includes a number of performance enhancing patches, including Robert Love's preemptible kernel patch, Rick van Riel's reverse mapping patch and George Anzinger's real time scheduler patch. Michael says of this patch, "I feel that there's need for a rapidly developing '-ac [like]' tree, and so, here we go. Feel free to test it""

Comments

New kernel tree akin to ac tree.

[Zapman]

Read what the maintainer says on the slashdot article:

"I feel that there's need for a rapidly developing '-ac [like]' tree, and so, here we go." --Michael

The -ac tree has moved on to the 2.5 world. He feels the need that -ac filled in the 2.4 world is still there, so he's doing something about it. This really isn't any more fragmentation than there was beforehand.

The -ac tree existed as a 2.4 (and 2.2 before it, and 2.0 before that) testbed (sort of a development kernel in the stable kernel code) that saw a decent bit of testing from developers. People could submit patches to Alan, and they had a much better chance of getting included. After they'd been tested for a few versions, and cleaned up some, and whatnot, the patch would go to Linus for inclusion in 2.4. Michael is offering his services to do the same job now that -ac has moved on to 2.5.

Re:FreeLinux, OpenLinux, NetLinux?

[rtaylor]

If you really wanted to get technical FreeBSD is heavily fragmented within for the purpose of code creation without toe stepping.

TrustedBSD, SMPng, and KSE stuff were all seperate BSDs (temporarily anyway).

Branching source for the purpose of better co-ordinating development without forcing others to wade through your broken source or wait on you is a good thing.

However, I'm not overly fond of Linux branching for development by indivials rather than for a specific project -- but thats just a labelling issue :)