This week marks the real start to the development cycle for Ubuntu’s 9.10 release called Karmic Koala. The Ubuntu Developer’s Summit is being held in Barcelona this year, and is now in full swing. A lot of interesting blueprints have been uploaded to Canonical’s Launchpad service. Let’s see what kind of topics the Ubuntu folks are discussing for this release.
There appears to be some major discussions about changing some things around in the kernel. Here’s a list of kernel-related blueprints and what they mean.
- Improve Power Management: Its been quite a while since lesswatts.org has been up and there are still some low hanging fruit the kernel guys can work on. The Linux kernel is now getting some of the fruits of labor of lesswatts.org but more can still be done. Ubuntu’s Kernel Team is thinking of providing additional functionality to intel’s PowerTop software to give feedback data from users running it. This will go a long way in providing data to developers on which software needs to be updated to make use of such things as high resolution timers, and rounded timer events. As an example, the laptop I’m writing this on has an average of 120 wakeups per second. 25% of those wakeups go to firefox. Getting data like this could help the Mozilla folks to cut down on the number of wakeups Firefox does. If a large enough number of savings can be found throughout the kernel and some of the userspace software, not only will mobile users get longer battery life, but servers will also see their power consumption decrease.
- Hardware Database Workshop: It seems the idea of overhauling the Ubuntu Hardware Database is starting to gain steam. I wrote an article about giving Ubuntu something similar to mobile me, and part of that included linking a hardware database entry for launchpad bug submissions. I also recommended Ubuntu use Fedora’s Smolt. It seems openSuSE is now using Smolt, and its much more mature than anything Ubuntu uses now. So, why not? That discussion will wait until another article. Suffice it to say, having better hardware information attached to bug reports will dramatically help in the triage of bugs related to hardware and kernel.
- KMS in the Ubuntu Kernel: Kernel Mode Setting is a way for the linux kernel to set the video hardware resolution and color depth. Currently X.org handles mode setting, but with newer kernel graphics drivers, moving that capability out of X.org. This will allow Ubuntu and other linux distributions to provide a flicker-free boot experience. Performace should also increase, and having the kernel set display modes is more secure, since user-mode applications would not need superuser access.
- Removal of non-upstreamed code / Sponsoring /staging drivers: Kernel developers want to take out the code they’ve added to the Ubuntu-specific kernel over the years, and shift it upstream. That way others have access to it; more eyes will be able to develop the code and Ubuntu’s kernel maintainers will no longer need to solely develop it in-house. By also sponsoring the /staging drivers section of the kernel repository, Ubuntu kernel developers will be able to provide the best drivers available once those drivers hit the mainline kernel. This will get more and more people hacking on some subpar drivers that are already included in Ubuntu. Other distributions will benefit from this and more time can be spent on distribution-specific development.
Some more interesting blueprints point toward using some newer technology to improve the Linux experience:
- Grub2 as Default: Grub2 has been around for a while. However, Grub1 has been around alot longer. Grub1 has issues, mostly resolved by Grub2, but since its mostly stable it stays in use. For Karmic, the developers want to go ahead and migrate to Grub2. This will allow alot of good testing of Grub2 as Grub1 is phased out over the next 6 months. Grub2 definitely pushes forward with features Grub1 just could not implement due to its older architecture. Its also another step needed for a smooth boot experience, much like KMS.
- USB Creator: Laptops and Netbooks don’t don’t with CD-ROM drives anymore, they’re too big. The issue is that making an Ubuntu CD image into a USB image is difficult for non-tech people. Ubuntu developers want to create an easy way to format and load a USB drive to be bootable and run the installer.
- Wine Integration: One thing I’ve noticed in using Wine on Ubuntu is that it feels like you’re using a completely separate environment when using an application like Photoshop. Ubuntu developers want to provide users with a more seamless Wine experience. Features include changing the way Application installed in Wine are presented in the menu system and moving the Wine configuration options to System > Administration.
All in all some good new technologies are going into Karmic, such as increasing the ease of deploying the new EC2 compliant Eucalyptus cloud computing platform. Along with Eucalyptus, many changes and feature additions are happening in Ubuntu Server Edition. For those who need a Linux server solution but rely on newer technology not available in Debian Lenny or CentOS, check out Ubuntu Server Edition. It’s coreleased with Ubuntu standard editions every 6 months and comes in LTS formats. Firefox 3.5 will make its appearance in Karmic, along with (hopefully) Google Chrome for Linux. Security and Quality Assurance policy changes are also hitting the development team for Karmic.
Even some of the mundane blueprints can offer alot of added value to Ubuntu. Its doubtful even those running xubuntu are doing so on 386/486/586 machines. The Pentium Pro was the first i686 chip, and its doubtful those are still used. The Pentium2 is the lowest CPU I’d be comfortable running a modern operating system on. Therefore, retargetting the build system for x86 to i686 would add a few compiler flags to really make use of more modern CPUs if the user plans to stick with a 32-bit system. I still urge those who are capable of running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu to give it a shot. Flash is…acceptible…under 64-bit now, and as more and more users switch Adobe will spend more time working on the 64-bit version. Skype is also acceptible although still has some configuration challenges with PulseAudio that eBay needs to work out. Where’s our feature parity with Windows and Mac users Skype? C’mon now. One version with the same features, not much to ask.
Maybe they’ll fix PulseAudio too…but that might still be asking too much.
What features are looking forward to with Karmic Koala? Leave a comment. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed!
