News

• How Fast is Linux Developed and Released?
  An average of 3,621 lines of code are added to the kernel tree every day, and a new kernel is released approximately every 2.7 months.
  The kernel, since 2005, has been growing at a steady state of 10 percent per year.
• Who is Writing Linux?
  Every Linux kernel is being developed by nearly 1,000 developers working for more than 100 different corporations. This is the foundation for the largest distributed software development project in the world.
  Since 2005, the number of active kernel developers has tripled, reflecting the growing importance of Linux in the embedded systems, server, and desktop markets.
  Between 70 and 95 percent of those developers are being paid for their work, dispelling the “hobbyist” myth present from the start of open source development.

Quote

2.6.23 includes the new, better, fairer CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, make SLUB the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes.

Quote

"CFS's task picking logic is based on this p->wait_runtime value and it is thus very simple: it always tries to run the task with the largest p->wait_runtime value. In other words, CFS tries to run the task with the 'gravest need' for more CPU time. So CFS always tries to split up CPU time between runnable tasks as close to 'ideal multitasking hardware' as possible. "Most of the rest of CFS's design just falls out of this really simple 32 concept, with a few add-on embellishments like nice levels, 33 multiprocessing and various algorithm variants to recognize sleepers."

Quote

The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago on April 25'th. An overview of all the changes merged into the latest version of the kernel is maintained in the Kernel Newbies wiki. Included in the list of changes are the SLUB allocator which replaced the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture. Source level changes can be tracked via the gitweb interface to Linus' kernel tree.