Thinking about Linux 4.0...

From: Timothy Miller
Date: Mon Jul 26 2004 - 14:52:06 EST


"4.0, you say?" Well, the idea is to get people thinking about things which otherwise they might not suggest because they're just too outlandish.

With the embracing of this new development model, we will speed up Linux microevolution. New features which are consistent with the philosophy of 2.6 will be accepted more readily. But there will now be some added resistance against, shall we say, punctuations in the equillibrium. That is, revolutionary new ideas which break things or affect the philosophy of the kernel in a very fundamental way will be shunned. The reason this is a problem is because, I expect, 2.6 will live longer as the bleeding edge than those that came before.

It might be interesting to see people discuss advances to the Linux kernel which, if interesting enough, would force a meaningful push into 2.7. And also interesting would be discussion of ideas that would be good for the kernel to have but which are too radical for 2.6.

Also, if you have an idea in reserve which you think would not work for 2.6, you might be wrong. It might be that some radical ideas could be made to fit.


Here's an example (probably a bad one): Lots of discussion has been going on about reducing latency. Many of the ideas just patch over the latencies, rather than, say, making it impossible to have latency problems. Is there room in the future of Linux to have a driver model which is much more real-time in nature?

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/