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."

Good 64 bit support

[Anonymous Coward]

support the new AMD 64 bit processes and be optimized for them

Multiple-kernel support

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Maybe we should start working on a way to re-load the kernel without rebooting. I don't know if it's practically possible, but it certainly would be neat!

Erm..Userfriendly UI?

[FileNotFound]

How about a userfriendly UI that'd let me configure everything without having to recompile eveything (or do it invisibly) just so that I can play and use without the pain and suffering that is require nowdays.

My main gripe with Linux has been that it's a bitch to configure for things that should't be so hard. Trying to get powermanagment to work on my IBM took me months and never worked right.

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 :)

Nessisary Rewrites: SCSI, TTY

[strredwolf]

Linux Journal's May 2003 issue had an article from Rob Love about what's new in the 2.6 kernel (new VM, ALSA, improved IO subsystem, preemptive kernel) and with a few items: SCSI needs to be rewritten to make it smarter than the drivers, and the TTY code needs a rewrite -- "it's looking like to be hack."

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.

Unified Installer

[headkase]

What I'd like to see is all the different dependancy based package managers like Red Hat's RPM system or Debian's Apt-Get be unified into a standard installer/uninstaller that all distributions can use.

Hardware detection

[Brad Mace]

Better hardware detection and auto-configuration would help old and new users get things running. I still can't get the scroll wheel on my stupid mouse working. Mice are simple and critical enough that they should be setup without any user intervention.

Currently even fairly advanced users can get hung up trying to get hardware to work. Windows has a huge advantage in this area even though you usually need a cd of drivers.

Even better would be a way to build a kernel that detects and includes support for your hardware automatically.

Re:Hotplug CPU & RAM support

[yerricde]

If you're compiling a large program, your motherboard and OS support hot-swap, and you add more RAM, then yes, the next GCC process to execute will see the extra RAM.

Removing RAM, on the other hand, would probably need a hardware switch on the motherboard that swaps everything in that bank to disk.

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!!

Ultimate flexibility and scalability...

[realyendor]

I would like to be able to share proc, mem, disk, and net resources across multiple machines (as is partially implemented in openMosix [sourceforge.net]) AND run multiple instances of Linux on a single system (as in User-mode Linux [sourceforge.net]). These two features combined would provide the ultimate solution in hardware resource flexibility and scalability in large server deployments. It looks like VMware Server [vmware.com] provides similar functionality, but with cross-platform capabilities and at a cost of over $1500 per processor.

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...

Re:Unified Installer

[Kethinov]

Damn straight. I'm a Gentoo man personally, but even portage is not a solution to this dependency hell problem. You should be able to download an RPM, double click it, and install a program without having to deal with solving dependencies manually. I really wish Linux would evolve beyond this trivial crap. It's the one thing that prevents me from recommending Linux to the average Joe (besides Gentoo's abysmal install process of course).

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.

Re:Nessisary Rewrites: SCSI, TTY

[parnold]

What about the ide layer rewrite which was started in early 2.5 but was later abandoned because of instability? story here [kerneltrap.org] If it was meant to be in 2.5 then it should shorly be in by 2.7.