LWN predictions and timeline
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LWN ☛ Some things to expect in 2025
We are reliably informed by the calendar that yet another year has begun. That can only mean one thing: the time has come to go out on a limb with a series of ill-advised predictions that are almost certainly not how the year will actually go. We have to try; it's traditional, after all. Read on for our view of what's coming and how it may play out.
The extensible scheduling class (sched-ext) will be a game changer. Already we have seen, in 2024, how the ability to load a CPU scheduler from user space as a set of BPF programs has unleashed a great deal of creativity; that was before sched-ext was part of a released kernel. In 2025, this feature will start showing up in more distributions, and more people will be able to play with it. The result will be a flood of new scheduling ideas, each of which can be quickly tested (and improved) on real systems. Some of those ideas will result in specialty schedulers included with focused distributions (systems for gaming, for example); others, hopefully, will eventually find their way into the kernel's EEVDF scheduler.
Code written in Rust will land in the kernel at an increasing rate over the course of the year as a result of the increased availability of abstractions and greater familiarity with the language in the kernel community. The Rust code that has been merged so far is mostly infrastructure and proofs of concept; in 2025, we'll see Rust code that end users will run — but they may never notice. The number of unstable language features needed by the kernel will drop significantly as those features are stabilized by the Rust community.
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LWN ☛ 2024 Linux and free software timeline
In the past, LWN had a tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year in early January. We thought we might try reviving that tradition in 2025 to see if our readers find it useful. While we have covered these events as they happened, it's interesting to see how much has taken place in just 12 months.
As always, our subscribers have made creation of the timeline—and our weekly coverage throughout the year—possible. If you like what you see here (and elsewhere on the site) please consider subscribing to LWN if you are not already a subscriber. If you are, thanks much for making all of our coverage possible.