The smallest kernel, put together thanks to a collection of patches by the Linux-tiny project, weighs in at just 197KB. After two years of inactivity, maintainers Michael Opdenacker and other developers are looking to breath new life into the project.
Collaboration with Novell on virtualization and Web service management, and quality of interaction between Windows and Samba are the next topics that Microsoft's Linux developer, Tom Hanrahan, will be focusing on.
The latest GNU compiler provides better support for parallel programming, and GCC also rolls out some new optimization features. We took GCC 4.2 for a test drive.