Next-gen distros
Blast off into the future with Matt Holder as he explores the technology powering a new generation of Linux distributions.
Computing never sits still, as new hardware features arrive and software is updated to take advantage of them, so new flaws, bugs and security issues appear. OS architects devise new ways to counter filesystem errors, memory leaks and privacy issues, with Linux always leading the way.
We’ll dissect the problems that next-gen distros are solving, before introducing the concepts that solve the issues and give examples of next-gen distributions you can try today.
The main players in the Linux distribution space are all committing huge amounts of developer time to creating the most reliable experience possible. Using the techniques that we’ve had available for at least a decade, progress has been excellent, but after all this time, advances have arguably slowed down as the experience has become better, so where are the new features being developed?
Commercial options – see Android, Mac OS and Chrome OS – use some of the techniques we’ll be discussing, which have been designed to improve OS reliability. To take one example, Android uses a set of read-only partitions, so the user – who we hear causes a lot of issues – doesn’t have root access to the system. This is just one way new distro architectures are improving user experiences for the better.
Designing a better distro
Let’s look at some of the changes that have become prevalent in recent years. The first is L the development of init systems, which are integral to a running Linux system as they control the running of all processes. Early in the boot process, the kernel starts the init process and it continues to run as a daemon. Various options exist, all the way from the venerable SysVinit, developed for Unix decades ago. Canonical spearheaded the use of Upstart, before Systemd became the popular choice for most distros.
In the late ’90s/early 2000s, the most commonly used filesystem was extended2 (ext2), soon succeeded by ext3 and ext4, which are journalling filesystems, which greatly increases the reliability when things like power cuts occur. The ZFS filesystem arrived in 2001 and is renowned for its broad feature set and how reliably it stores data. It uses checksumming, which can be used to reconstruct any data that becomes corrupt for any reason. ZFS is probably overkill for most home users, but Ubuntu makes it simple to install and use. Btrfs has been reviled for issues with some RAID functionality, but is reliable for less enterprise purposes and has extra features that we will discuss later.
Built for reliability
A cleverly designed partitioning scheme can be used to replicate what is employed by Chrome OS to provide a reliable method of software updates. Chrome uses an A-B partitioning sys
