Torvalds on Filesystems, Netbooks, KDE 4.0
Ever year, Linus Torvalds goes on vacation to Australia, during which he usually also visits linux.conf.au. During his stay this year he gave an interview to ComputerWorld, in which he talked about the success of point releases and the important topic of file systems in Linux, which is quite an active field today with ext4 and Btrfs. He also gave some insights into why he switched away from KDE, moving to GNOME instead, and he shares his thoughts on Windows 7.
Because of the inability to add support for ZFS to the Linux kernel due to the GPL being incompatible with Sun's CDDL license, Oracle started work on Btrfs, a GPL-licensed file system that should bring ZFS-like functionality to Linux. Currently, Btrfs is in the beta stage, but support for it has been added to the mainline Linux kernel - despite its beta status. According to Torvalds, there are two camps when it comes to file systems: the one that wants stability, and the one that wants to release often. "You want filesystems to be stable, but you can't be in beta forever," Torvalds notes, "Btrfs is developmental, but it was merged in the main kernel to help people test it." This obviously indicates that Torvalds and his crew of kernel maintainers acknowledges that Linux needs something to compete with Sun's ZFS, and therefore, they decided it made sense to make it as easy as possible for Linux users to test the new file system and report possible bugs.
