What do you want from Red Hat?

Dan Yocum (yocum@fnal.gov)
Mon, 16 Aug 1999 12:14:29 -0500

Talking with our local evangelist, GP Yeh, he brought up an interesting idea:
now that Red Hat is worth just under 5G$, what should we, the Linux Community,
like to see them do with the money. In other words, where should they focus
their efforts in development?

I propose we make a list and send it to them, either directly to Red Hat or to
get the community at large involved as well by posting to Slashdot, and let
the people speak.

Currently, this is my grocery list:

NFSv3 client and server - Trond Myklebust is working on a client and
has got good read/write results, but a server is still needed.

Improved SMP - SGI is clearly going to be working on this, but outside
help/funding is always nice to have.

Clustered file system - an open source implementation of XFSC or support
for the GFS project, or support for ....

Linux Standards Base - Yes, they follow it, but how about further
funding the group to work on it, with the same sort of arrangement VA
hired Maddog to be a Linux Evangelist, not necessarily a spokesman for
VA.

Journaling File System, soft updates, and >2GB file support under IA32
- Steven Tweedie is working on it, but bring some other people into
the fray, maybe hire/fund Kirk McKusick from BSD?

Improved Gigabit - fund work on the zero-copy code. Again, the BSD
guys have this down pretty good as evidenced by the work being done at
Duke.

Anything else? Send me your additions and comments, questions, and concerns.
I'll bring it all together and post to Slashdot.

Cheers,
Dan

___________________________________________________________________________
Dan Yocum | Phone: (630) 840-8525
Linux/Unix System Administrator | Fax: (630) 840-6345
Computing Division OSS/FSS | email: yocum@fnal.gov .~. L
Fermi National Accelerator Lab | WWW: www-oss.fnal.gov/~yocum/ /V\ I
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