What to Expect From Linux This Year
Evaluating the Linux roadmap for the coming year is difficult because, of course, no such roadmap exists. However, if you pay attention to discussions in the Linux community, you can come up with a good idea of what's going to happen in the near future. CIO.com's Joe Brockmeier looks at what to expect in the Linux world.
Wed, January 11, 2012
CIO — The last year for Linux was an exciting one. The little hobby project from Finland turned 20, rolled over the 3.0 milestone, and dominated almost everything from mobile devices to supercomputers. That's a tough year to follow, but 2012 will still be an interesting year for Linux.
Linux doesn't really have a roadmap. What you get is the result of collaboration among hundreds of developers from many companies. Nobody is setting up a feature list and directing developers to work on them—things make it into the kernel (or are taken out) when a developer (often as part of their day job) submits a patch and gets it accepted. This isn't always a straightforward process, and it can take months or years for some features to make it in, if at all.
But if you pay attention to discussion in the Linux community, you can get a reasonably good idea what's going to happen in the near future. Here are a few things you can expect to see in Linux in 2012.
Btrfs Improvements
One of Oracle's big contributions to the Linux kernel is Btrfs, a filesystem that adds many features that enterprises would like to see in Linux. For example, Btrfs allows for snapshots, a maximum file size in the exabytes, compression, integrated RAID features and many other features you don't find in Ext.
However, Btrfs has been missing a few features—most notably a filesystem check (fsck) tool—that you'd want before rolling it out for production use.
We should be seeing the Btrfs fsck tool early in 2012, and with that expect to see it pushed into some of the community Linux distributions like Fedora pretty rapidly. If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that Btrfs will eventually supplant Ext4 as the default filesystem for most major Linux distributions. Don't expect to see it in widespread use in production before mid-2013, though.
Android, ARM Alignment, Embedded Focus
Linux in embedded devices will continue to be a major focus in 2012. This includes everything from set-top boxes like the Roku to Android phones and tablets, to printers and just about anything else you can think of.
A lot of fuss has been raised in the tech media about Google's Android being a "fork" of Linux. Here's what you haven't heard much about since then—the Linux kernel folks and the Android folks have been doing their level-best to sync up the mainline kernel and Android's kernel.
With the 3.3 kernel, much of Android's functionality should be present in the mainline kernel. Not everything, but progress is being made pretty rapidly. If all goes well, users should be able to run Android on top of a vanilla kernel by the end of the year.
