Event Highlights
• OEMs rally behind Open Source Drivers. One-third of the Summit attendees participated in the Linux Foundation’s fifth Desktop Architects’ Meeting. In Austin, leading computer manufacturers Dell, HP, Lenovo, and many others met with the desktop community to collaborate and optimize Linux for their new desktop and ultra-mobile products. A key result from the meeting was that these OEM vendors reported that they will encourage chipset and other component vendors to provide open source drivers for Linux. The companies announced on stage that they will now include wording in their hardware procurement processes to “strongly encourage” the delivery of open source drivers for transparent integration into the Linux kernel. Asustek Computer, Inc., manufacturer of the popular Linux-based Eee PC, is also encouraging its hardware suppliers to provide open source drivers for Linux. VIA Technology also announced the opening of their drivers and better support for the open source community at the Summit.
• New Driver Backporting Workgroup. Canonical, Novell, Red Hat, and others have formed this new workgroup to speed the process for porting new drivers to older versions Linux. This effort is expected to help solve one of the most important commercial issues for companies that ship Linux by improving time-to-market and enabling the automated installation of the newest drivers on older versions of Linux. While Linux driver support is the broadest in the world, many commercial companies use older versions of Linux in their products that don’t include the latest driver support. The Driver Backporting Workgroup will address this issue by implementing a process that simplifies packaging, distribution and installation of drivers, including matching the right drivers with different hardware components. For more details on the Workgroup, please visit: http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Driver_Backport_Charter
• Next-generation Internet Compliance (IPv6). At last year’s Summit, IBM identified the IPv6 protocols as an area where immediate collaboration was required in order for Linux to be primed for the next-generation of the Internet. This is important because of government purchasing requirements stipulating this support. Since then, Bull, IBM, HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat have made contributions and at this year’s Summit in Austin, the IPv6 work group was able to announce that Linux is IPv6 compliant to DoD mandated requirements. While there is still work to do to address the additional emerging requirements, this is a concrete example of vendors coming together at the Collaboration Summit to solve a pressing issue for Linux.
• Linux on Mobile Devices. The Summit hosted for the first time representatives of all the mobile Linux platforms — Android, Moblin.org, GNOME Mobile, and LiMo – on one stage. The groups agreed on the enormous value of using the Linux kernel to efficiently manage any hardware, but shared their differing views on which higher-level software components provide the best environment for developer applications. Representatives from the platforms evaluated the potential of using the multi-million dollar database and test infrastructure of the Linux Foundation’s Linux Standard Base (LSB), which is available under an open source license as an application and device compliance solution.
• Virtualization Mini-Summit. At the Summit, leaders from the various virtualization projects (Xen, KVM, lguest, VMware, qemu and others) met to solve issues and collaborate on common objectives. This included work on interfaces, qemu and the lack of upstream interest in x86 virtualization specific patches. The result of this meeting will be enhancements to the virtualization capabilities of Linux.
Also at the Summit, IDC’s Vice President of Research, Al Gillen, presented a new IDC White Paper titled The Role of Linux Servers in Commercial Workloads. The white paper, sponsored by The Linux Foundation, outlines the state of the Linux server market and can be downloaded at: http://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/IDC_Workloads.pdf.
