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October 21, 2008

On October 14, the Linux Foundation held its 1st Linux Foundation End User Summit in New York City. Overall, the representatives from many Wall Street investment firms were in attendance, including Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, JP Morgan-Chase, the NYSE and even people from the U.S. Navy were there also.

At the Linux summit, there was a detailed unveiling of the next-generation file systems for Linux: BTR-FS.

According to the summary "BTR-FS is currently being worked on by a group of Linux Foundation members. Led by Oracle, this group also includes developers from IBM, Intel, Novell and a few other IT companies.

The Linux group hopes to have a version in the kernel by the end of 2008. Customers' initial reactions were favorable on ease-of-use in particular."

On the file system front, large enterprise storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp have been touting still-in-development "parallel NFS," (part of NFS v4.1). There was reportedly much interest in this at the summit.

"Many large financial customers have a large number of mid-sized nodes in a data center (say 2000 or so) which have relatively little data on local hard disks and rely on network file systems (NFS or AFS today) to supply the critical data," says the summary."

It added "for these types of companies parallel NFS and persistent NFS client caching are important issues."

One other development at the summit was that event organizers could see that many attendees had broad experience with Linux, but not always awareness of the wide variety of tools and community choices availabe.

To address that, the Linux Foundation is working on an Internet-based knowledge center, and will call on vendors and advisory councils to contribute to it.

At many of the events the Linux Foundation holds, the issue of more drivers for better compatibility comes up, and this summit certainly wasn't any different.

"Community representatives encouraged these large consumers of Linux to advocate for open source drivers from their suppliers so that they can be properly supported," says the summary.

There really does need to be more outreach from the Linux community to hardware manufacturers for updated, working drivers.

Overall, this year has been a big year for the Linux Foundation. It has held a number of successful events attracting interest in Linux, and solidified itself as a top representative for the Linux community. Its free and open source FOSS-Bazaar governance workgroup has doubled its membership in 2008.

Source: The Linux Foundation.

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