What Will Be in Linux 2.7?

Realistic_Dragon writes "The first discussion has been sighted on the Linux kernel mailing list to put together a feature list of things that should go into Linux 2.7 - including hotplug CPU & Ram support, network transparent sound and improvements to Netfilter to bring it up to the the level of OpenBSD's Packet Filter. And all this before most of us have started to run 2.6.0-preX, or even a 2.6 series stable release happening. Perhaps if you have a (sensible) idea now would be a good time to voice it, otherwise you will have to wait for 2.9 to get it included."

Comments

What I'd like to see...

[ikewillis]

is a scheduler on the same caliber as Solaris, so that the kernel can utilize multiple schedulers simultaneously. Linux currently ships with only a timeshare scheduler, but Solaris supports a number of different schedulers which can all operate simultaneously. Administrators can also move processes between different schedulers on the fly as well. A Fair Share Scheduler, for example, would be nice so that resources on large systems can be partitioned effectively as to prevent certain processes from monopolizing system resources. The CPU/RAM hotplug support would be nice... glad to see Linux trying to catch up to where Solaris was years ago. Just kidding :)

Re:What I'd like to see...

[photon317]

Oh please. No doubt having had a different focus and so many years of time advantage, there are key areas where Solaris still trumps Linux. For instance, multiprocessor scalability (although it seems they sacrificed performance on 1-2 cpu boxes to acheive this result for their 64+ cpu boxes).

However, don't ever claim that Sun's kernel is in general superior to Linux. In a lot of ways Sun's kernel is ancient and crappy compared to Linux. Take a look at Sun's IP stack versus Linux's, for instance. Or how about lvm+softraid? When will Solaris stop relying on Veritas? (and don't answer diskuite, please). Or how about good integrated netfilter-like code?

While we're on it, let's talk hardware. The price /performance ratios on UltraSparcs make Xeons look like a super bargain, not to mention Athlons. It's way past late for them to have closed up the Sparc shop and moved everything over to this cheaper commodity platform that can pump more mips or flops per dollar than Sun can. And how freaking long did it take them to adopt PCI? At one point in the past 64-bit 25Mhz SBus was acceptable.... but how long did they have to delay deploying PCI on their high end systems before finally giving in?? It was nuts, and they've finally owned up and gone pretty much solid PCI-only now. Of course, now most of my Suns have 64/66 PCI busses, while my latest Intels are doing PCI-X...

Kernel Sanders

[KrackHouse]

The beauty of Linux (IMO) is the ability to tweak the kernel. Why not take advantage of the fact that there is source code to be modified and make it simple for the average user to recompile the kernel? It's an ugly, ugly process right now and a lot of people are running distro kernels that aren't as optimized as they could be.

Native Support for SATA Drives!!!

[goldspider]

The only barrier to me running Linux on my home computer is that Linux has no native support for serial-ATA hard drives. As such, of course, I am unable to install Linux.

PLEASE include native support for SATA!!

A oft-requested but oft-ignored request.

[GoNINzo]

I wish there would be default stack protection, right out of the kernel. I'm tired of these repeated buffer overflows, and I know people can code right around them even with stack protection, but at least an attempt to make it harder for stack busting would be nice.