Unless you closely follow the Linux
kernel mailing list, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the
latest kernel features and changes, especially as the pace and scale of
development continues to rise. More than
LWN Editor Jonathan Corbet will moderate the Linux kernel developer panel at Collaboration Summit in Napa, March 26-28, 2014.
1,300
developers from more than 200 companies contributed 12,127 patches to
the 3.13 Linux kernel, released in January, according to LWN Editor Jon
Corbet's latest
Linux weather forecast. And Linus Torvalds will soon release the 3.14 kernel, which will contain a whole new set of features and fixes.
The Linux kernel developer panel at
Collaboration Summit in
Napa, Calif. next week is our first opportunity this year to hear
directly from Linux kernel developers about which issues and features
are top-of-mind for the kernel community now and in the year ahead.
Kernel developers Jens Axboe, Matthew Garrett, Mel Gorman, Greg
Koah-Hartman, and Dave Chinner will take the stage for a technical
discussion moderated by Jon Corbet. Here, the panelists have answered a
few of Corbet's preliminary questions to get the conversation started.
Jon Corbet: Who do you work for, why do they support your Linux
kernel development, and what do they expect to get back from that
investment?
Jens Axboe:
I joined Facebook about two months ago. Facebook supports a lot of open
source projects, not just the Linux kernel. They built their platform
on top of open source technology, so they fully recognize the value in
supporting and improving open source projects. They even take it a step
further than most with the Open Compute Platform, opening up the
hardware side as well. So I think it's safe to say that they are
Jens Axboe, Facebook.
serious about being open, and it has paid off economically as well.
Matthew Garrett: I'm a security developer at Nebula, a company
producing a private cloud solution. The Linux kernel is the foundation
of our product, and the basis of many of the security technologies that
we implement. Working upstream means we benefit from review by experts
and avoids the need to spend time updating patches every time we want to
move to a new kernel. It's a little more initial effort, in the long
term we end up with a better solution and less wasted developer time.
Matthew Garrett, Nebula.
Mel Gorman: I work for in the R&D department within SUSE
which is an independent business unit within The Attachmate Group. SUSE
is a software and services provider whose principal product is SUSE
Linux Enterprise (SLE) which is a GNU/Linux distribution. There are many
projects that SUSE contributes to and one of those is the Linux kernel.
Among our many internal projects, we develop and support a fork of the
kernel with our source trees published publicly. Internal policy is that
all feature development is first developed upstream and backported.
There are exceptions to this policy but they are rare.
Mel Gorman, SUSE.
Our
work with the free software community is what our product and services
are based on. We work on the various projects to implement solutions
required by our customers, to remain competitive and sometimes because
it's just fun. The upstream policy for kernel development ensures that
SLE features are widely reviewed and tested by both the company and the
community and controls maintenance overhead. For example, in the event a
bug is filed against the SLE kernel there is a chance that the same bug
was encountered in the mainline kernel which reduces the time required
to close the bug. Interoperability is one of the important benefits for
our customers using SLE with many additional supporting products such as
SUSE Manager. Merging features upstream first avoids introducing
incompatibilities with
Greg Kroah-Hartman, The Linux Foundation.
other distributions.
Greg Kroah-Hartman: The Linux Foundation. Because they are
very nice and let me do development on a wide range of kernel subsystems
and maintain the stable kernel releases. (In return they get) a
constant stream of stable kernel releases.
Corbet: What are you working on right now?
Jens Axboe: Right now I'm focused on blk-mq, the block
multiqueue storage model. It was introduced in the 3.13 Linux kernel,
but more work still remains. I'm busy improving the performance and
extending the driver coverage, so we can hopefully end up with blk-mq
being the one true storage interface for block drivers in the kernel.
Matthew Garrett: Yet another iteration of kernel patches to
support Secure Boot, integrating TPMs into our security policy, writing a
library to allow runtime configuration of server firmware. And trying
to make Linux run reasonably on this Mac.
Mel Gorman: The last feature I worked on was Automatic NUMA
Balancing but while I do not consider the feature to be 100% complete
I'm not developing it further right now. Right now I'm working on
stabilizing the latest kernel that will be used for SLE, validating
features, identifying any regressions that have been introduced since
our last major release and resolving them. In some cases the regressions
also exist in the mainline kernel in which case the bug will be fixed
for the upstream, openSUSE and SLE kernels.
Greg Kroah-Hartman: I'm reviewing the
OPW (Outreach Program for Women) submission patch process (over 400 patches
submitted
so far), and doing my normal kernel subsystem maintainer duties of
merging patches sent to me and responding to questions asked on the
mailing lists. I also have some stable kernel releases being tested on
my build system before I release that for review by the community.
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