[ Thanks to james
andrews for this link. ]
“We should be running Kernel 2.4 by the year’s end. Major
new features include USB support, improved SMP [up to 8
processors!] and better plug and play. The groundwork has also
been laid for supporting Winmodems, but don’t hold your
breath–incompatibilities between individual Winmodems means
support for your particular model may still take some time. The
usual round of bugfixes, speedups and better foreign file system
support are also expected. Another cool technology which might
become part of a future kernel is DevFS, a new and dynamic way of
addressing the /dev directory.”
“SGI is contributing the SMP code and journaling file system
from Irix [their Unix variant] to Linux. This is a good thing,
because the SMP code in Irix is pure gold. Irix has scaled up to
256 processors before, and while this may be a while coming for
Linux, it’s more than most systems will likely even need. A
journaling file-system basically tracks changes as they are made,
and provides better safeguards against file-system corruption.
They’ve also developed a comprehensive set of Performance
Management Visualization tools that may be released open source (if
they get enough interest from the Linux community). Yaay! We love
SGI, even if they did dump their previously über-cool logo in
favor of their new boring one…”
“Intel is also developing a 64-bit kernel for use on its new
Merced Processor, expected around the end of 2000.”