By Rachel Chalmers
Having spent two and a half years developing the current production version of the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds says he hopes to have the next stable version – Linux 2.4 – out before the end of this year. 2.2 took way too long, the Finnish engineer admitted in his Linux World Conference and Expo keynote. Everyone got very frustrated. To prevent the same thing happening with release 2.4, Torvalds has been much less ambitious in his goals. We just want to use the interfaces that are already there to the best possible advantage, he explained. With SMP [symmetrical multi-processing], for example, the infrastructure is already there, but 2.2 didn’t take advantage of it. Version 2.4 should have much better SMP and should also make better use of the universal serial bus (USB) and intelligent input/output (I2O) standards.
The fast development cycle means, however, that certain features the Linux team had discussed including in the next stable release won’t be there after all. These include a journalling file system – Torvalds suggests that Red Hat, Caldera and the other distributions might like to roll their own as a value-added service. An end-of-year release date also means that 2.4 probably won’t include the Merced port, since Intel Corp won’t have lifted the non-disclosure agreement on its next-generation microprocessor. A planned source control system will probably be delayed, as will clustering, which Torvalds says will have to wait for version 3.0 in another year or two.
