What "one thing" do you want in the Linux kernel?

An interesting question came by this week. If I could have one free wish, one thoughtful choice, one wise selection, what would I want in the Linux kernel?

I was of course assured that my choice didn't mean I'd get it, but it was an interesting hallway poll for the day. I suspect the answers were being pulled together as input for this week's Linux Foundation meetings happening this week in Austin Tx... lots of people in town.

The mind races.

So back to the Linux Weather Forecast. Whew. What to choose, what to choose.

• http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Linux_Weather_Forecast written up by Jonathan Corbet of lwn.net fame.

In no particular order,

• A new completely fair scheduler - the promise of an updated scheduler is intriguing for performance teams. Course, on a practical level, the thoughts of rather extensive regression testing keeps popping up in my mind. Watching the progress of that effort is reassuring though, so this will be cool in the next revs of the distros.
  
  
• Kernel markers - cool technology which will make it easier for tools to hook into the kernel, which of course a performance team is always interested in. We need to make it absolutely seamless and safe for a customer, on a production system, as a protected but definitely non-root user, to gather system metric information.
  
  
• Memory use profiling- now this will be really nice - way too many times we're asked about memory usage of an application - which is particularly dependent on other things happening in the operating system.
  
  
• Real-time enhancements - continued integration of the real-time work happening in parallel in the community. This is proving particularly helpful in the HPC cluster space as work continues to improve the deterministic behavior of the operating system.
  
  
• Memory fragmentation avoidance - another longer-term project which positions the kernel for far more aggressive memory management and control of varying page sizes.
  
  
• And numerous other choices... better filesystems in ext4 and btrfs, better virtualization and container support, better energy management, improvements in glibc, etc etc
  

But really? All of these are in play today. All of them are being polished, updated, with many creative minds at work.

So what I asked for was for the kernel and Linux community to continue strengthening the ability to help customers easily understand and improve the performance of their applications and the system. Out of the box. Across all of the components. No special adds, rpms, or kernels on their installed system.

The nice part is the Linux programmers I work with are all committed to this. So the work continues - fit, finish, and polish - and continue working with the longer term changes which are being developed.