This is really good to hear. With Vista facing challenges on simply being released at all, now is the time for the kernel dev community to make each moment count. From the sounds of it, I’d say this is beginning to happen.

A year after Linux kernel development was cleft in three, users and vendors report the process has improved the speed and quality of development.

When developers opted to nix a separate 2.7 kernel development at the Linux Kernel Developers Summit last summer, the decision spawned three 2.6 trees: the mainline or stable kernel, known as 2.6.x, maintained by Linux founder Linus Torvalds; the 2.6-mm, or staging tree, where technologies are tested before being added to the mainline kernel; and the 2.6.x.y kernel, for bug fixes.

“The hierarchy in the community has flattened, so now you have small teams of experts working at consensus level rather than having a maintainer and all the subordinates,” said Dan Frye, director of IBM’s Linux Technology Center in Beaverton, Ore.

“We are just delighted. The stuff our enterprise customers need is getting done, and that is translating into shipments of high quality from the distributions,” Frye said…. Source: eWeek

[tags]linux kernel,2.7 kernel development,ibm’s linux technology center[/tags]