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

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.