How’s the weather? 100% chance of Linux

Here’s a cool development: The Linux Foundation has created a “Linux Weather Forecast” to help users track kernel developments.

Under clever headers like “current conditions” and “Climatological timeframes (i.e., post-2007)” the Forecast page lays out pretty much all you need to know about the kernel and where it’s going both in the short-term and long-term.

For example, in the “weather events that may never occur” section, we see the Reiser4 file system. This year the project’s lead developer encountered, shall we say, a “setback” (read: murder trial) and as a result the direction of this popular open source file system has become a bit muddled, to say the least.

Another sample:

Long-range forecast: Expect 2.6.24 sometime around the beginning of 2008. Features which may be in this kernel include:

• Group scheduling for the CFS scheduler
• utrace
• Much improved system memory use profiling
• Dynamic tick support for the x86_64 architecture
• Containers

It’s all presented in a Wiki format, as is par for the course today with open source sites, and I encourage you guys to check it out.