Re: [PATCH-RFC] 4 of 4 - New problem logging macros, SCSI RAIDdevice driver

Ingo Molnar
2002-09-28T07:32:07Z

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > Tangent question, is it definitely to be named 2.6?
>
> I see no real reason to call it 3.0.
>
> The order-of-magnitude threading improvements might just come closest to
> being a "new thing", but yeah, I still consider it 2.6.x. We don't have
> new architectures or other really fundamental stuff. In many ways the
> jump from 2.2 -> 2.4 was bigger than the 2.4 -> 2.6 thing will be, I
> suspect.

i consider the VM and IO improvements one of the most important things
that happened in the past 5 years - and it's definitely something that
users will notice. Finally we have a top-notch VM and IO subsystem (in
addition to the already world-class networking subsystem) giving
significant improvements both on the desktop and the server - the jump
from 2.4 to 2.5 is much larger than from eg. 2.0 to 2.4.

I think due to these improvements if we dont call the next kernel 3.0 then
probably no Linux kernel in the future will deserve a major number. In 2-4
years we'll only jump to 3.0 because there's no better number available
after 2.8. That i consider to be ... boring :) [while kernel releases are
supposed to be a bit boring, i dont think they should be _that_ boring.]

Ingo