4/23/12 1 That was the year that was in Linux Pacific Northwest National Laboratories April 23, 2012 Rick Lindsley IBM Linux Technology Center

4/23/12 2 Introduction Software engineer working with UNIX ®, Linux, or similar for almost 30 years Member of LTC (Linux Technology Center) since IBM bought Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. in 1999 Linux specialties: Linux kernel in general, and process scheduler specifically Named adjunct professor at WSU-TriCities in 2007

4/23/12 3 Topics today Where was Linux in April 2011? Changes from April 2011 Current state of 3.x Linux Q&A

4/23/12 4 Linux in April 2011 “Current release” in April 2011: automatic process grouping (read Transparent huge pages Btrfs improvements (compression, read-only)‏

4/23/12 5 Changes since April (May 19, 2011)‏ ext4 SMP improvement BKL – all finished!! 9 years earlier: pdf “Once the varied uses of the Big Kernel Lock are understood, the BKL can safely be replaced by other locking mechanisms.” Btrfs – additional compression functionality Transcendent memory Don't know size, writeability, readability

4/23/12 6 Changes since April (July 22, 2011)‏ [...] there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux. - Linus Torvalds Btrfs data scrubbing, automatic defragmentation

4/23/12 7 Changes since April (October 24, 2011)‏ Support for Near-field Communication Wii Remote controller support File system barriers enabled in ext3 VFS scalability improvements

4/23/12 8 Changes since April (January 5, 2012)‏ ext4 support for bigger block sizes Btrfs – faster scrubbing, identifying files ( btrfs inspect inode /mnt )‏ Process bandwidth controller TCP proportional rate reduction

4/23/12 9 Current state of Linux 3.3 (March 19, 2012)‏ Android merge ( Arose from discussion at 2011 Linux Kernel Summit First proposed in 2009 Btrfs improved rebalancing code (RAID changes)‏ EFI boot support

4/23/12 10 Retrospective from colleagues My input is the incredible speed of KVM maturation in function, performance, and robustness. The last 24 months have been a total hockey stick. - Dan Frye, VP Open Systems and Solutions Development (Founder of LTC)‏ Arm is well on it's way to being a first class Linux architecture. - Tom Gall, Multimedia Team Lead, Rochester There has been a lot of progress in Perf in the last year in the mainline upstream kernel. - Anshuman Khandual, BML & Power Enablement, Bangalore If you look at the latest top500 list, you will see that >90% of it is Linux (457 out of 500). - Pradeep Satyanarayana, Networking, Beaverton

4/23/12 11 Thoughts from me  What amazes me...  How Linux continues to grow  I can get paid for working on it!  The BKL is gone!

4/23/12 12 Thoughts from me (non-technical)‏  What amazes me...  I can't believe there are three series filming in Portland!  I can't believe how obstinate a 12-year-old can be!  I can't believe gas is $4 a gallon!  I can't believe what people will sue over!

4/23/12 13 Acknowledgements Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Source Group IBM and the IBM logo are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, in the United States and other countries. Other company, product, and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

4/23/12 14 Disclaimer Additional details on a particular Linux release can be found at or The opinions expressed are those of Rick Lindsley, not the IBM Corporation. If you disagree with them, please do send me , not them, and calmly explain why you're being so unreasonable.

4/23/12 15 That was the year that was in Linux Pacific Northwest National Laboratories April 23, 2012 Rick Lindsley IBM Linux Technology Center