The 2.6 kernel includes many new features and improvements over previous releases. Kernel developer Andrew Morton provides a personal tour, describes what lay ahead for 2.7 and beyond, and explains how others can contribute to the Linux core.
By the time the 2.6.0 production kernel was released last December, the kernels in the 2.5.x development tree had been stable for more than a year. There was little drama associated with the release of the new code (compared to previous stable kernel introductions) as the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), IBM, and others had been performing consistent, rigorous testing and the kernel team remain determined to keep the development kernel stable and usable at all times. In the end, going to 2.6.0 was mainly a re-labeling exercise.
In this article, I’ll discuss the major changes in the new production kernel, explain some subtle shifts in how kernel development works now [also see the sidebar “Linux Changes Linux Process” on page 40], detail what we hope to accomplish with 2.6, and, finally, recommend how individual developers and the growing number of corporate engineering groups that work on Linux can make contributions to the kernel.
Scaling Up and Down
A significant change in the 2.6 kernel is its ability to scale both up and down.
Scaling up has received most of the attention, but significant advances have also been made in the kernel’s ability to scale down to small systems. In particular, the work of the uClinux Microcontroller project (http://www.uclinux.org) was merged into the mainstream kernel. With that integration, 2.6 now supports embedded devices that lack a memory management unit, such as Hitachi’s H8/300, NEC’s v850, and Motorola’s m68k.
We reduced the kernel’s memory footprint,…
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