Last week, the
held its first Linux Foundation End User Summit in New York. Representatives from many companies were in attendance, including Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, JPMorgan Chase, Dreamworks, the NYSE, and folks from the U.S. Navy were there, too. The folks at the Linux Foundation sent over some highlights of the summit, which you'll find here.
At the summit, there was a detailed unveiling of the next-generation file systems for Linux: BtrFS. According to the summary: "BtrFS is currently being worked on by a group of Linux Foundation members.  Led by Oracle, this group also includes developers from IBM, Intel, Novell, and other companies.  The group hopes to have a version in the kernel by the end of this year.  Customers' initial reactions were very favorable on ease-of-use in particular."
At many of the events the Linux Foundation holds, the issue of more drivers for better compatibility comes up, and this summit was no different. "Community representatives encouraged these large consumers of Linux to advocate for open source drivers from their suppliers so that they can be properly supported," says the summary. There really does need to be more outreach from the Linux community to hardware manufacturers for updated, working drivers.
On the file system front, large enterprise storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp have been touting still-in-development "parallel NFS," (part of NFS v4.1). There was reportedly much interest in this at the summit. "Many large financial customers have a large number of mid-sized nodes in a data center (say 2000 or so) which have relatively little data on local hard disks and rely on network file systems (NFS or AFS today) to supply the critical data," says the summary. For these types of companies parallel NFS and persistent NFS client caching are important issues.
One other development at the summit was that event organizers could see that many attendees had broad experience with Linux, but not always awareness of the wide variety of tools and community choices availabe. To address that, the Linux Foundation is working on a web-based knowledge center, and will call on vendors and advisory councils to contribute to it.
for the Linux Foundation. It has held a number of successful events attracting interest in Linux, and solidified itself as a top representative for the Linux movement. Its free and open source FOSSBazaar governance workgroup has
.  Kudos to Jim Zemlin and the others at the Linux Foundation for pushing forward with all these efforts.