Linux Kernel 3.0?

An anonymous reader writes "A discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list between Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Linux guru Ingo Molnar, and a few others debated the name of the upcoming stable kernel release. The choices: 2.6 or 3.0. Evidently there's been enough improvements, most notably the VM, that they're leaning towards calling it 3.0..."

Comments

Re:Testing 2.5

[Webmonger]

The 'testing' time frame-- probably the closest thing to that is the planned Oct 31 feature freeze. After that, the focus should be on getting it into a releaseable state.

Re:Make 2.6.3 usable, never install a dot-oh versi

[msaavedra]

Wouldn't it be great if 2.6.1 was as robust as 2.2, or 2.4.17, at the beginning?

Things just don't work like this. It's difficult to say before a release whether it will be extremely robust. The only way to test stability is to get a whole lot of people to pound on the kernel and find stability problems. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen until Linus declares that the kernel is stable. But he's really just saying "As far as I can tell, the kernel is stable."

Anyway, not everyone had results as good as you with the 2.2 kernels. In fact, you may recall that 2.2.0 wasn't stable at all; 2.2.1 was release shortly thereafter to fix a major bug. When I switched from 2.0 to 2.2, I had plenty of stability problems, mostly due to buggy drivers. Things gradually improved through the 2.2 releases, until I finally stopped having problems around 2.2.14. From looking at LKML archives, I suspect this is the norm, rather than the exception.

In fact, I would say that linux kernel development has the following general pattern:

1. Linus maintains an unstable branch, and developers add new features, make big changes in the code, etc.
2. Linus declares a feature freeze, and developers fix bugs until things seem to work well.
3. Linus declares a stable release, and a huge number of people begin using the new kernel. All the new users expose a bunch more bugs, and the developers work to fix them.
4. The kernel becomes stable in fact rather than just in version number, and Linus gives up maintainership to someone else. He then opens another unstable branch, and the whole cycle begins again

Re:About the "new driver model"

[captaineo]

No, as long as Linus is in charge there will never be binary compatibility of modules between minor kernel versions (or even different configurations of a single version, e.g. UP or SMP). Linus considers it too much trouble to be worth the effort.

AFAIK the new driver model basically puts all drivers in a uniform structure, primarily for the purposes of handling power management (sleep states) uniformly, and of moving towards a simple, standardized layout for /proc interfaces. There has been some talk about revising the module loading/unloading process (since the current methods still have some problems), but no action has been taken yet.