Linux Kernel 2.4.10

erinntriggs writes "Kernel 2.4.10 is out and available at the usual places." You know the drill people! Time to make bzImage and wreck those glorious uptimes.

Comments

So... how's the VM these days?

[1010011010]

I ask as a swap-laden 2.4.7 user...

Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[marm]

Those of you who use Linux as a desktop may be interested in the pre-emptible kernel patch for 2.4.10, available from here.

This patch allows the rescheduling of in-flight kernel syscalls if a higher-priority process than the process calling the syscalls becomes eligible to run.

What it means in practice for the typical desktop user is a major enhancement to interactive performance under Linux, especially when under heavy load. Your X pointer will never freeze with this patch. Using this patch, I have played skip-free mp3's whilst my system has had a loadavg of 20, and my KDE desktop was still usable. I could never hope to achieve this with ordinary Linux. It's a really impressive bit of work. Go try it out.

Of course, people with the need for proper real-time response out of Linux (musicians, for example) will love it even more... maximum latencies for me with this patch are under 4ms - again, very impressive.

It's slated for inclusion in the mainline kernel early in 2.5, but could do with lots of testing first... you know what to do.

First Impressions 2.4.10 from 2.4.8

[hackus]

My System:

Redhat 7.1
X 4.0.2

Hardware IBM ThinkPAD A21p PIII 850/512MB

1) Graphics performance for my M3 ATI processor in my IBM Thinkpad has quite frankly increased a great deal. This is way obvious do to the rapid spinning of my OpenGL plugin for XMMS.

MESA demo's show a 23% speed improvement. Especially tunnels mesa demo frame rate.

VWARE shows a drastic improvement in sound processing ability on my thinkPAD when I use 2.4.10. I am not sure why, 2.4.8 was a good improvement but 2.4.10 is even better.

(Gotta have my ArtBell...)

2) Virtual memory now shrinks its pool considerably when free memory is used up and you start to quit processes.

I loaded Oracle 8.1.7, VMWARE 2.0, Forte' , Bugseeker, and my website up, and MySQL. I was short 170 Megabytes of memory and the virtual swap space handled it very well.

Wasn't slow at all, at least too me. I then logged out and quit all my apps after running some non trivial tests.

I did notice my SWAP shrunk from 170 to 30MB when I logged out and shut everything out.

This is very good, I haven't tested whether or not the kernel will kill a process that takes all memory and is obnoxious about memory, without killing the machine. I would like this feature as normally Linux will just die.3) Startup time was faster by 5 seconds with no changes. I am not sure why, probably do to the memory management fixes.

My use of VMWARE suggests some rather dedicated speed improvments to the basic software.

If you have 2.4.8, you have little reason and everything to gain by upgrading to 2.4.10.

Speed, more effective VM, and graphics are improved noticably.

I highly recommend you upgrade.

-hack