> I'd also like to see much better boot management. The idea of an OS booting
> to a textual display in 1997 is ridiculous. Also, the current boot strategy
> is an all or nothing approach. If you don't make it to a login prompt, you
> better have a recovery boot disk around. That sucks.
The idea of a router not needing a VGA card or a hard drive in 1997 is
great. I like my Matrox (thanks, Andrew) and 20" monitor as much as the
next guy, but when I need a router or packet firewall, there's immense
appeal to a one floppy solution that runs on EGA or serial terminal. I
want Linux to compete with Cisco as well as Microsoft/SCO/Novell.
> At this stage of the game, we should be laying down ideas for a 3.0 version
> of Linux, and trying to stabilize 2.1 for final release, and definitely
> maintenance mode 2.0 to encourage upgrades to the next stable release. As
> far as I can tell, there are far too few reasons for any reasonable user to
> upgrade to 2.1 at the moment if you have a recent 2.0 kernel - we need to
> change that.
I'm not sure I understand. If 2.1 doesn't have enough new stuff, why
should we be trying to stabilize it?
2.1 kernels were never meant to be run by "reasonable users". Hopefully,
2.1 will be remembered as the development series where TCP/IP throughput
came into its own, filesystem cacheing improved dramatically, the SMP
guys got passable kernel multithreading, and SCSI clustering was
introduced [film at 11 on that last one - ed.] At any rate, we no longer
have to answer all those config questions about filesystems nobody's
ever heard of!
I can't bring myself to blame David Miller for backporting TCP/IP
improvements to 2.0 and taking away another reason for stable kernel
users (stable users? stable kernel?) to upgrade.