Linux 3.0

An anonymous reader writes "In a post to the kernel mailing list, Rob Landley, sitting in for the floating Linus, cracks the whip over what will be in Linux 3.0. His orders are on Linux and main."

Comments

Why do i care?

[nurb432]

Not to sound like a troll, or flaming developers, but seriously, from a users standpoint, why do i care?

What i have now works great, give me concrete reasons i should worry about a new release.

Now as a developer i DO care.. I'm just looking at this from the stand point of a normal user ( my customers ) who hear the same stuff from M$ or apple.. 'new and improved, you must upgrade now'... And we used that as a selling point for Linux..

Reiser4

[KagatoLNX]

I *sooooo* hope the Hans gets off his butt and gets ReiserFS 4 in this one. If you follow the LKML closely (or just read the Kernel Traffic, http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest.html) then you may have heard he's sweating a bit on getting it in.

Reiser4 may just revolutionize the way the some people do stuff. I mean, next system I want to be able to do:

# cat /etc/passwd
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
jim: x:100:100:jim:/home/jim:/bin/bash
# cat /etc/passwd/jim/uid
100
# echo /bin/ksh > /etc/passwd/jim/shell
# cat /etc/passwd
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
jim: x:100:100:jim:/home/jim:/bin/ksh

All that *and* have transactional data commits with a very small performance hit!

(ReiserFS Trolls: Go ahead, bring it on!)

New console layer

[jaymzter]

I for one am totally psyched about re-writing the console sublayer. It's so aesthetically annoying to be running a multi-headed system, yet be reserved to only one head when on a tty. I think this has a high geek factor

DOS didn't have automount.

[Inoshiro]

DOS had stateless device access. Until you tried to look at a device, DOS would not touch the device (floppy drive, hd, or CDROM drive). But when you did change to the device, it would try and read in its base directory and bootsector.

Windows emulates its behaviour towards floppy disk drives, as you will find out very painfully if you click on the A: on a computer without a floppy drive (which, for me, is all of them), or without a disk in the drive.

Automount only works on hardware that gives feedback on when media is inserted (such as a CDROM drive). To prevent Badness (TM) in the blocklayer, the automount has traditionally been eschewed in favour of explicit mount. Why? Try removing a CD that's being read from in Win9x, and watch the blue-screen "Please insert CD labelled ..." as the kernel catches a block layer exception. This can be worked around by adding drive locks every time the drive is accessed, but it's generally considered to be a hairy problem best solved by having a smarter user.

Of course, many distributions include the (separate) automount patch anyways, and people who want this behaviour won't be rolling their own kernels any time soon.

Re:My most anticipated feature

[pcidevel]

I develop drivers for Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux (for a PCI card that my company makes). I would love to see a Kernel dump for a particular problem I am trying to debug at the moment! :)

Of course, stupid mistakes in Solaris or HP-UX kills their kernel and results in waiting for the machine to reboot. Stupid mistakes in Linux results in a kernel panic with the output sent to the syslog (9 times out of 10 bad code doesn't kill the entire Kernel, so no waiting on the machine to restart), so I definately think that Linux has the upper hand as far as handling poor kernel space code.