Rapidly Growing Linux OS: Features and Reliability

Linux has been making rapid strides through mailing lists of volunteers working in the Linux communities. These volunteers help develop source code, provide usage results, report information about problems in the communities, and quickly provide required bug fixes. The latest kernel version (version 2.6) reflects many improvements that have been made to Linux, primarily in memory management and process scheduler functions. Consequently, Linux has become a much more advanced OS. This paper describes the following four features being developed by Fujitsu in conjunction with the Linux communities for mission-critical systems: 1) diskdump for reliably collecting dumps at kernel crashes and hang-ups; 2) an enhanced machine check architecture (MCA) for minimizing the effects of hardware failures and recovering from failures with a machine check facility; 3) udev: a persistent device naming feature that ensures a device name before and after maintenance or expansion; and 4) hot-plug for performing hot system maintenance of the CPU, memory, and I/O bus and expanding the system space.