File system, power and instrumentation: Can Linux close its technical gaps?

Linux developers are pointing out three major technical holes that will take serious development effort to close.

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 06/06/07

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Legal threats may be the high-profile risk for Linux, but the popular open source kernel project is coming face-to-face with key technical shortcomings, too. As the Linux Foundation plans its first Collaboration Summit for June 13 through 15 at the Google campus in Mountain View, Linux contributors are speaking out about kernel gaps that have no solution readily in sight.

Andrew Morton, a kernel developer best known for filtering and testing new kernel submissions in a test kernel called the "-mm tree", listed three major problem areas in a May "State of the Kernel" talk at Google: the file system, power management, and instrumentation. The file system, one of the areas of kernel development requiring the heaviest computer science work, is software that determines how to place and index data on disk or other nonvolatile storage — and Linux's file systems are falling behind the demands of large storage users.

In an e-mail message, project founder Linus Torvalds says he agrees that the file system and power management need to work. The latter, he says, is part of a bigger problem with device drivers that basically work but don't implement advanced features. But, Torvalds says, the simple instrumentation Linux already has is enough to deal with real-world performance issues.

Torvalds adds what he calls the "development flow" to the list of concerns. "We've always had issues with how certain subsystems end up having development problems due to some infrastructure issue, or just personality clashes, or some methodology being broken. Sometimes it's not 'subsystems,' but hits at an even higher level, and we end up having to change how we do things in general," he says.

Linux has already been through major shifts in development process. With the release of the 2.6.0 kernel in December 2003, Torvalds and other developers stopped maintaining separate stable and research development trees for the kernel, although a new line of stable kernel releases began again with the 2.6.11.1 kernel in 2005.

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