Re: Linux 2.1.69..

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Tue, 02 Dec 1997 13:01:17 -0500


Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Anyway, I personally don't see anything major pending. There are still
> various fixes that have yet to be integrated (some of the smbfs work by
> Bill etc), but on the whole I'd call this feature-freeze time. Have fun,

Hi Linus,

There are a few pending projects I've heard about that I'd like to see
included if at all possible. I'm not sure of the current status, but
perhaps the authors can offer a timetable.

Not in any particular order, they are:
(1) Mark Hemment is doing some work on reducing memory fragmentation by
building higher-order pages. The fragmentation problem is IMO the most
serious remaining mm problem in Linux.
(2) Zlatko Calusic is making some improvements to the files structure to
reduce memory requirements.
(3) Erik Andersen has a rewrite of CDROM driver support -- mostly
finished, I think.
(4) Several filesystems are still broken, but patches for affs and ums
are mostly done.
(5) Michael Chastain's smarter dependencies build overhaul would be
helpful for those of us who don't have SMP and frequently change kernel
options.

Regards,
Bill