About 30 top programmers--including Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and Linux luminaries Alan Cox, Stephen Tweedie, David Miller and Donald Becker--gathered to hash out the future of the next version of Linux. The Kernel Summit likely will become an annual event because there's no longer enough time for the old process--informal gatherings at trade shows--said summit organiser, VA Linux Systems employee, and fellow Linux programmer Ted T'so in a conference call Tuesday.
Predictable improvements to Linux have become more important as the software grows from its hobbyist roots into a business venture with the involvement of companies such as Red Hat, Transmeta, Caldera Systems, SuSE and IBM.
Though these companies fund Linux development to make improvements, they also depend on those improvements arriving on time. The technology market slump has removed what leeway Linux companies had.
The corporate trappings of Linux get stronger with each passing year. IBM, Advanced Micro Devices and EMC sponsored the summit, while Linux companies paid for many of their employees to attend.
Most of the improvements the programmers discussed had to do with improving Linux for use on servers, the Unix clone's stronghold. But speeding up development of the heart of Linux, called the kernel, also is a priority, T'so said.
Torvalds released the current kernel, version 2.4, three months ago but about 13 months later than he originally hoped. Torvalds had exhorted programmers to focus on creating the stable, production version 2.4 instead of adding new features into the development version 2.3, but the schedule still slipped.
"It's always more fun to work on the new stuff than stabilise the existing kernel," T'so said. "We were very ambitious in the number of things to accomplish in 2.4. Therefore, it took a lot longer than we thought it might take."
Those at the summit didn't set a schedule for the 2.5 developer version or the stable 2.6 version, but T'so said they hoped to make it shorter than the 2.3 series. "Everyone agrees the last development cycle, which was a little over a year and a half, was too long," he said. Six to nine months, though, isn't enough time to get much done, he said.
"We're going to try to keep the 2.5 series shorter than what we did in the 2.3 development time frame, but at this point it's premature to come up with any dates," he said.
T'so said programmers are working on cleaning up the 2.4 kernel. "The 2.5 kernel series will probably start in a few months," he said. "We're still trying to iron out the last wrinkles in the 2.4 series."
One difference this time around is that new features in the 2.5 development kernel likely will be "backported" to the 2.4 kernel as they become stable enough to use, T'so said. This technique was used with the older 2.2 kernel, which benefited from 2.3 enhancements to support features such as USB (universal serial bus) connections.
