Innovation in the Linux environment

Far Ahead

Red Hat no doubt stands at the forefront of innovative development for Linux. This has been especially true for the past five years during which Red Hat developers have developed significant amounts of software that has advanced the evolution of the Linux universe. In the case of systemd, the developer Lennart Poettering has been the driving force, but there is no general consensus. This is true even though the new init system has largely been successful in asserting itself with the distributions.

A small but vocal minority, however, views the project as a betrayal to Unix and considers Red Hat an evil force that tries to control Linux. With all due respect for the criticism, the vast majority of users believe that systemd advances Linux because it gets rid of dead wood and unifies many aspects among the distributions.

Looking Forward

The people at Red Hat have been talking about stateless Linux [14] since 2004 (Figure 5). The discussion has grown along with continued development, but so far implementation of the idea remains far off in the future. The desired results, on the one hand are that developers, distributions, and users should come closer together when new versions of packages are involved. On the other hand, more unified standards should make it easier for developers to test improvements.

Figure 5: Stateless images make it possible to boot from an identical system state.

For example, the technology makes it possible for a corporation to connect relevant images of the operating system for use with a fleet of notebooks to a single, stateless, image on a server. The images on the notebooks are updated when they boot. Device mapper [15] accomplishes the updates atomically. This makes it possible to roll back the system in case of errors. Meantime, the live directory system does not undergo changes.