The current Linux 2.4 kernel generally supports four-way and eight-way systems and only 8 Gbytes of memory, Morton said. While embedded system makers and desktop Linux vendors can exploit some of the enhancements, vendors of enterprise Linux distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE, Conectiva and TurboLinux will see a nice bump up in performance and speed.
"The greatest improvement is in scalability," Morton said. "It scales up and runs faster on big machines."
But much of the industry focus on the kernel has switched from the individual features to litigation surrounding the code itself. SCO in March filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, claiming that IBM improperly donated thousands of lines of Unix code to the Linux kernel. And last week, the Lindon, Utah-based company claimed it would file a lawsuit against a Linux customer within the next 60 days. SCO also hinted that it could sue Novell over the planned SUSE acquisition.
Morton said the crew of open-source developers working on the Linux kernel are certain that no one has introduced thousands of lines of Unix code to the Linux kernel.
"We're a fairly tight-knit community who have been working together five years, and if a new person with 100,000 lines of code [tried to contribute], it would stick out like sore thumb," Morton said. "You can tell when something has grown up in a different environment and is ported over to another [platform]. We've gone though Linux and looked at all the major subsystems, and we couldn't come up with anything. We mentally took a walk though the kernel and came up with a blank."
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