Hadoop 2.x is developed from hadoop-1.x, with the significant features over hadoop-1.x:
- HDFS HA for NameNode (manual failover)
 - NextGen MapReduce (YARN)
 - HDFS Federation
 - Performance
 - Wire-compatibility for both HDFS and YARN/MapReduce (using protobufs)
 
Hadoop 0.23.x is a trunk which contains:
- HDFS Federation
 - NextGen MapReduce (YARN)
 
Hadoop 1.x is developed from hadoop 0.20-security code support for:
- security
 - HBase (append/hsynch/hflush, and security)
 - webhdfs (with full support for security)
 - performance enhanced access to local files for HBase
 - other performance enhancements, bug fixes, and features