A stable and mature Linux kernel is enabling its chief developers to shift away from the common kernel development model to one that will result in more frequent releases. Up to now, once a production Linux kernel was released, stabilized, patched and updated as a point release, any new feature or technology in progress was moved to a new development and test kernel.
But with a common goal of providing a more constant, smoother and faster development cycle, new technologies are being put directly into 2.6.x, while any move to start a 2.7 development tree is still many months away, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, told eWEEK in an e-mail interview. The current production 2.6 kernel was released in January, and its most recent version, 2.6.9, was released in October.
"There still hasn't been a single patch that has made me or Andrew [Morton, who maintains the 2.6 kernel] say, 'Hmm, that looks too fundamental; it really needs 2.7.' So right now, I'm trying to concentrate on being good about merging 'regular' things into 2.6.x," Torvalds said. "We'll see when we get to the point that people get too frustrated about something really disruptive that we need a 2.7.x.
News source: eWeek
But with a common goal of providing a more constant, smoother and faster development cycle, new technologies are being put directly into 2.6.x, while any move to start a 2.7 development tree is still many months away, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, told eWEEK in an e-mail interview. The current production 2.6 kernel was released in January, and its most recent version, 2.6.9, was released in October.
"There still hasn't been a single patch that has made me or Andrew [Morton, who maintains the 2.6 kernel] say, 'Hmm, that looks too fundamental; it really needs 2.7.' So right now, I'm trying to concentrate on being good about merging 'regular' things into 2.6.x," Torvalds said. "We'll see when we get to the point that people get too frustrated about something really disruptive that we need a 2.7.x.
News source: eWeek
Thanks to eddieturtle for the heads-up on this one
Not sure that this qualifies as a "new tack" on the development model, as anything major that requires more work & testing will be put into the development series, just like before.
So, they don't put these new minor improvements in the existing kernel line? Why?
Kernel development used to work this way: when a solid release was hit (like 2.0 or 2.2 or 2.4), not many big new changes to the kernel were added, and most of the changes between point-releases (2.4.17 to 2.4.18 etc) were bugfixes and security patches. There were one or two exceptions (Virtual memory management anyone?) but on the whole, anything major went into the new development version (2.3.x, 2.5.
The new development model seems to be more set on integrating new changes etc into the current stable kernel, instead of forking off a development branch and playing with stuff in there. It does, by definition, mean that the vanilla kernel itself will be less stable, but Linus has (wisely, imho) decided to acknowledge the work of distro maintainers and developers by basically saying that the distro-provided kernels are what stable production systems will most likely be using anyway, so he might as well leave the rock-solid kernels to them.
I would like to use a very stable kernel with least pitfalls. It is necessary for corps to use a heavily tested kernel.
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