14 DAY TRIAL // The 9th edition of the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) started yesterday with Jonathan Corbet's Linux Kernel Report and a reception organized by Intel to present their forthcoming products.
After saying a few words over the Linux kernel's history and its releasing cycle, Corbet mentioned that now the kernel enjoys a predictable release cycle, every time bringing up new interesting features and modifications.
According to Corbet, each kernel release cycle is now foreseen by a 2 weeks merge period, where new features and changes are made, following the release of -rc1 and then 8-12 week period of stabilization. Then a new stable version of the kernel is released. It seems that this release cycle pattern came once with the release of the 2.6.12 kernel and then the entire kernel development community complied with it.
After that he went further and spoke about the advantages and disadvantages as well brought by this new release system. He noticed that these days it takes only a few months for the new features and changes to be applied to the stable kernel version, compared to Linux's earlier days when it took a few years. The ugly part comes when you should consider the bug tracking, regression testing, documentation and fixing difficult bugs. As Mr. Corbet was saying kernels are released with known bugs still in place because of lack of right hardware.
Regarding the forthcoming 2.6.22 kernel, Corbet said that this one would come with a new mac80211 wireless stack, a new FireWire stack, IVTV video tuner drivers, a new CFQ/IO stack, eventfd() system calls, UBI flash-aware volume management and a SLUB allocator.
The day closed with Intel's annual reception I've mentioned above, with free food and drinks. This year Intel had no speeches, but only a technology demonstration in the corner of some of the company's latest hardware.