Linux Foundation Offers Highlights from Annual Collaboration Summit

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[April 28, 2008]

Linux Foundation Offers Highlights from Annual Collaboration Summit

(Wireless News Via Acquire Media NewsEdge)
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to
accelerating the growth of Linux, announced highlights resulting from
its second Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was
hosted by IBM in Austin, Texas earlier this month.

The Foundation reported that attendance at this year's Summit grew more
than 30 percent over last year's and included leaders from the kernel
community, desktop, industry and end users communities.

"The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is the only place where key
leaders and stakeholders in Linux come together to discuss the most
important issues facing the operating system," said Jim Zemlin,
executive director at The Linux Foundation. "This year we saw
breakthroughs in driver support for the desktop, IPV6 compliance and
virtualization. We feel it's an important venue for solving
cross-industry and cross-community issues." The Foundation noted
highlights from the LF Collaboration Summit include:

-- 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 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.

-- 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 three mobile Linux platforms -- Android, 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 each platform 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: linux-foundation.org/publications/IDC_Workloads.pdf.

The Linux Foundation: www.linux-foundation.org.

((Comments on this story may be sent to newsdesk@closeupmedia.com))

((Distributed on behalf of 10Meters via M2 Communications Ltd -
http://www.m2.com))
((10Meters - http://www.10meters.com))

Copyright ? 2008 Wireless News

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