What i would like to see in upcoming kernel releases...

[Dominik Kubla <dominik.kubla@uni-mainz.de>]

I. Features so far not available:

1. Raw-I/O:
   Yes, we had lengthy discussions about this one.  But face it folks:
   Raw-I/O is a de-facto standard of all Unix-like systems, with the
   notable exception of Linux.  And they are a definite must for HA
   databases.

2. Kernel dumps:
   Same applies for this one: kernel dumps have been proven to be
   a very helpful debugging tool.

3. Log-structuered and/or journaled filesystem:
   There has been lots of talk about those two as well.  They are
   a definite must for HA systems.  Despite all the talk about
   reiser-fs and such, the best would be to simply port the BSD stuff
   to Linux (same goes for Berkeley FFS as a replacement of EXT2FS).

4. A comprehensive set of kernel development tools:
   Drop the stuff in scripts and create a stable set of tools (not
   unlike the stuff found on BSD, DEC-Unix or Solaris) which would
   be distributed seperately from the kernel sources (after all this
   stuff does not change very often!).

5. A complete and bug-free console terminal emulation (not the "linux"
   crap, but rather a complete VT220 emulation). Again BSD shows us how
   it is done.


II. Important stuff which was lost before 2.2.0:

1. ISDN:
   Right now the ISDN stuff in 2.2.0 is unusable.  And the SPARC patches
   scheduled for 2.2.1 and the ISDN code from the ISDN4Linux CVS server
   collide (because of the new support for the onboard ISDN hardware of
   SUN workstations - not that i mind: i own a SparcStation 10 myself).

2. PNP:
   Is that stuff still being developed? Last time i checked it was quite
   out-of-date...

3. Documentation:
   Lots of changes in 2.2.x break lots of stuff which used to work in
   2.0.0, especially BOOTP is a no-go.
   And we desperately need a tuning-guide to Linux!

Wow, that list grew rather long!

Yours,
  Dominik Kubla
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Linux-future: thinking about the future of the Linux kernel
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