Another area garnering a lot of interest is virtualization, for which a number of solutions are being actively worked on for Linux.

Corbet said the biggest issue with virtualization is all the competing methods want to be supported in the mainline kernel with their own hypervisor but "we are never going to include all, just one."

"We now have one called paravirt_ops which isolates low-level operations," Corbet said. "This is the interface that has been adopted for hypervisor access and people are starting to use it."

The popular Xen is a full paravirtualization solution that has generated "a lot of hype" but its path into the kernel has been slow for a lot of reasons, Corbet said, and may get even slower.

A separate dev that went into 2.6.20 is Kernel Virtual Machine, or KVM, which supports hardware virtualization.