New Features For 2.5 Linux Kernel

An anonymous person writes "The current development version of the Linux kernel is 2.5. At the recent Linux kernel summit, it was agreed to have a "feature freeze" on this kernel by October 31, 2002. Here's a story looking at what's left to be merged before the freeze. Projects most likely to make it into 2.5 (and thus be a part of the next stable kernel, 2.6), include: the reverse mapping VM, the Linux Security Module framework, User Mode Linux and support for filesystems greater than 2TB."

Comments

To infinity, and beyond!

[Dirtside]

So what I'm wondering is, wouldn't it be possible to invent a disk addressing scheme which basically self-extends, so that you would never really need to manually change things to support disk sizes beyond a certain size? In other words, depending on how big your hard drive is, the addressing method would change to address sectors of a certain size, keeping the need for indexes/tables/whatever down to a certain size, etc.?

Serial ATA support - why?

[yem]

From the TODO:

Would be nice to have before feature freeze, but most likely 2.7:
...
o Serial ATA support

From serialata.org:

Q13: When does Microsoft plan to support Serial ATA in its OS's?
A13: Serial ATA is software compatible with Parallel ATA and requires no changes to Microsoft operating systems, or any other OS as well.

If this is a drop in replacement for parallel ATA, why is support needed in the linux kernel?

mounting floppies, CD's and DVD's

[oever]

I'd like to install linux on my Mom's new computer, but the mounting of disks should be a lot easier. All we regular linux users are very accustomed to it, but really, it's rediculous.

It possible to jerk out my netword PC-Card. The network is closed down nicely. Reinsert the card and the network restarts.

But if I put a floppy in the drive, I cannot read it by default. Aargh. Sure, I can use automount, but then it's not safe to just remove the floppy.

And for the CD it's even more weird. A CD/DVD player has a button. This is disabled when I mount a CD. So a mounted CD cannot be ejected. Yet, mounting the CD when it is inserted. That's apparently asking too much.

It's great that so many new features go into the kernel. But why can't a simple feature like this make it into the kernel. There's no lack of patches.

kbuild?

[spongman]

how about kbuild that has been ready for a fucking eon? yeah, yeah, it's a big patch, so were the first few that went into 2.5, and kbuild2.5 was ready then, too. and still we wait for kai to pretent he's helping...

politics: from the greek: poly:(adj.) many, ticks:(n., pl.) blood sucking animals.

Re:Serial ATA support

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is Serial ATA support important?

Because it is fast looking like serial ata disks are going to be hitting the market in a big way, before the end of this year. By the time 2.6 comes out, it is going to be more than important.

Controllers from all the major manufacturors are out as of now, and disks from seagate and maxtor are likely to be out next month.

And to boot, all of the prototype Opteron motherboards seen to date have had Serial ATA onboard. It seems improbable that they'll have a standard ide controller as well, considering that the serial ata controllers can be used with standard ata drives, via a converter.

If support doesn't appear, linux users will be left in the dust.

In kernel checkpoint support?

[maynard]

I'd really like to see one of the checkpoint patches includeded in the mainline kernel series. There are several to choose from: EPCKPT, CRAK, CP.... Which one doesn't matter (feature wise), they all basically allow for the kernel to stop a process, save it's state and pages to a file, and then load and restart that process by request.

Yes, I could distribute a patched kernel across all of my systems. But then I'm tied to that kernel until whichever project I'm following updates their patch (or I update it myself, and I don't consider myself competent as a kernel hacker). This would be a really useful mainline feature for those of us in the scientific computing community. Wasn't there some talk of one of these going in 2.6 proper? --M

So much for Enterprise Linux

[baptiste]

While I understand that you have to draw the line somewhere and that it can be difficult to deal with such far flung development groups with their own priorities. BUT...

Why is XFS still not considered ready? Its in almost every major distro except for RedHat. Heck - the XFS team even provides custom XFS RedHat installer iso's to fill in the gap. XFS v1.1 is already released and is being used on huge fileservers in production all the time. Why can't we get past the 'we don't like the way you tweaked module X' and finally move forward.

I wish EVMS was going to be ready - this is going to be huge for enterprises - finally a unified, feature rich storage manager.

LVM 2.0 - well, I'd rather ensure 1.x is super stable (it is so far for me) so this isn't as big a deal.

Serial ATA - Bummer. I realize this is new. But I get the feeling Serial ATA is going to be huge, especially for lower end servers. Finally getting real hot plug support and a setup that'll make things easier on the HW RAID vendors (I can't wait to see a Serial ATA card from 3-Ware!) I would hope this would be flagged as something to be merged into 2.6 as soon as its possible, even if marked experimental.

Don't get me wrong - I'm really psyched for 2.6, but there are some features (whose development is out of the control of the core kernel team) we really need, to push Linux farther and farther into the enterprise. I know you can patch in what you want - but many IT folks, even Linux zealots, are wary of doing so in production - they want stock RedHat kernels so they can tell their boss its gone through RedHat Q&A and all that. Its CYA sure, but necessary in many environments. Granted RedHat often adds stuff not in the stock kernel, but not usually hueg features.