Portland (ip-192.com): Linux may need a diet, according to Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator said the open source kernel has become “bloated and huge.” James Bottomley, a Novell engineer, confirmed during a roundtable discussion at LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon that the performance of Linux drops about 2 percent with every new release of the kernel. Performance today is about 12 percent lower than it has been before the release of the last 10 kernel updates, said Bottomley.

Asked what the community is currently doing to resolve the issue, Torvalds replied "Uh, I'd love to say we have a plan. I mean, sometimes it's a bit sad that we are definitely not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel that I envisioned 15 years ago. The kernel is huge and bloated, and our iCache footprint is scary.”

While stability is not an issue, Torvalds feels that “… whenever we add a new feature (to the Linux kernel), it only gets worse.”

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