"Within a year or so people will not be complaining about wireless drivers anymore," Corbet said.

With disks getting bigger and comparatively not that much faster, Corbet said the time it takes to check file systems is getting longer and Linux needs more advanced file systems to deal with this trend.

"Disks are not getting more reliable [and] our file systems are old," Corbet said. "Most of the action is with ext4, which is in the mainline kernel."

Corbet said ext4 has a different way to lay out blocks which is better for large disks and the 48-bit block size will get over the 8TB limit.

On the competing file system, Reiser 4, Corbet said it has a lot of interesting ideas but it is still stalled and unless someone adopts it, it may fade away.