Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:45:19 -0200
From: Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com>
To: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>, Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>,
       William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>,
       Diego Calleja <diegocg@teleline.es>, Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org>,
       davidsen@tmr.com, aebr@win.tue.nl, solt2@dns.toxicfilms.tv,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: starting with 2.7
Message-ID: <20050106094519.GD20203@logos.cnet>
References: <20050103004551.GK4183@stusta.de> <20050103011935.GQ29332@holomorphy.com> <20050103053304.GA7048@alpha.home.local> <20050103142412.490239b8.diegocg@teleline.es> <20050103134727.GA2980@stusta.de> <20050104125738.GC2708@holomorphy.com> <20050104150810.GD3097@stusta.de> <20050104153445.GH2708@holomorphy.com> <20050104165301.GF3097@stusta.de> <20050104210117.GA7280@thunk.org>
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On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 04:01:17PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 05:53:01PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > 
> > My opinion is to fork 2.7 pretty soon and to allow into 2.6 only the 
> > amount of changes that were allowed into 2.4 after 2.5 forked.
> > 
> > Looking at 2.4, this seems to be a promising model.
> 
> You have *got* to be kidding.  In my book at least, 2.4 ranks as one
> of the less successful stable kernel series, especially as compared
> against 2.2 and 2.0.  2.4 was far less stable, and a vast number of
> patches that distributions were forced to apply in an (only partially
> successful) attempt to make 2.4 stable meant that there are some
> 2.4-based distributions where you can't even run with a stock 2.4
> kernel from kernel.org. 

You got to be kidding now?

99% of the features distributions have applied to their 2.4 based kernels 
are "enterprise" features such as direct IO, AIO, etc.

Really I can't recall any "attempt to make 2.4 stable" from the distros,
its mostly "attempt to backport nice v2.6 feature".

Do you have any example?

> Much of the reputation that Linux had of a
> rock-solid OS that never crashed or locked up that we had gained
> during the 2.2 days was tarnished by 2.4 lockups, especially in high
> memory pressure situations.
> 
> One of the things which many people have pointed out was that even
> 2.6.0 was more stable than 2.4 was for systems under high load.

It took sometime to happen, but instability related to "high memory pressure" 
has been fixed in almost all cases long ago (the only remaining issue to
my knowledged is loopback device with highmemory).

I hardly see complaints of "crashes under load" problems since v2.4.19/20 
or so.
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