[LWN Logo]

Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 15:00:02 -0700
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo@tummy.com>
To: NCLUG Mailing List <nclug@nclug.org>, lug@lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] LinuxWorld Day 4, March 4, 1999


Images at http://www.tummy.com/reports/LinuxWorld99/

LinuxWorld Day 4
March 4, 1999

Today is the last day of the conference.  With the exception of walking into
the speakers lounge and finding it packed with EMT people working on somone
on the floor, it was pretty laid back.  I went to Stephen Tweedie's
presentation this morning on the future of the ext2 file-system.  As I
mentioned in the report from Linux Expo last year, the future is bright.
Included in the 2.3 development phase will be Journaling, BTrees for
improved performance, and other nifty things.

While this code will be able to mount ext2 file-systems, it will be
called ext3, so that the stability of the current ext2 file-system isn't
compromised.  Stephen also expects future enhancements to be made in the
direction of scalability for the enterprise (multi-terabyte file-systems
running on systems with 2 to 8 gigabytes of main memory), clustering, and
increased availability.

Speaking of which, we talked to Leonard Zubkoff in the VA Research booth
today and he showed off his new baby.  It was 2 four-foot racks which made
up an 8-way Zeon system with 5 Mylex 5-channel RAID boards and somewhere
around 70 36GB hard drives (hot swap, of course).  Nice box (see the
picture).

I ended up not attending any more of the presentations today because I got
stuck in conversations in the Speakers Lounge.

We made another pass through the exhibit hall to make sure there wasn't
anything we missed.  Oh, the other thing that VA Research was showing off
was a rather nice quad Zeon rackmount box that had a flat-panel display
running a really nifty graphics demo in ASCII using libaa.  Later when I
was talking to the HP Firehunter guy (from Fort Collins even), I couldn't
keep from looking over at that demo running across the aisle.

HP also was there with their new NetServer.  One or two processors with up
to a gigabyte of RAM and 2 hot-swappable hard drives in what looked like a
2.5U rack-mount case.  Nice...

Well, that's about it for this conference.  Look for more reports from
Linux Expo in Raleigh in May...
-- 
 Got Source?
 Linux: The Official Operating System of the Internet.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
URL: <http://www.tummy.com/xvscan> HP-UX/Linux/FreeBSD/BSDOS scanning software.
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