here to whore and to reduce stress on the servers!
final:
- Jeff Garzik: net driver updates
- me: symlink attach fix
- Greg KH: USB update
- Rui Sousa: emu10k driver update
pre6:
- various: fix some module exports uncovered by stricter error checking
- Urban Widmark: make smbfs use same error define names as samba and win32
- Greg KH: USB update
- Tom Rini: MPC8xx ppc update
- Matthew Wilcox: rd.c page cache flushing fix
- Richard Gooch: devfs race fix: rwsem for symlinks
- Björn Wesen: Cris arch update
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanup
- Tim Waugh: parport update
- Peter Rival: update alpha SMP bootup to match wait_init_idle fixes
- Trond Myklebust: lockd/grace period fix
pre5:
- Keith Owens: module exporting error checking
- Greg KH: USB update
- Paul Mackerras: clean up wait_init_idle(), ppc prefetch macros
- Jan Kara: quota fixes
- Abraham vd Merwe: agpgart support for Intel 830M
- Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader cleanups
- Al Viro: more cleanups
- David Miller: sparc64 fix, netfilter fixes
- me: tweak resurrected oom handling
pre4:
- Al Viro: separate out superblocks and FS namespaces: fs/super.c fathers
fs/namespace.c
- David Woodhouse: large MTD and JFFS[2] update
- Marcelo Tosatti: resurrect oom handling
- Hugh Dickins: add_to_swap_cache racefix cleanup
- Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update
- Martin Bligh: support clustered logical APIC for >8 CPU x86 boxes
- Richard Henderson: alpha update
pre3:
- Al Viro: superblock cleanups, partition handling fixes and cleanups
- Ben Collins: firewire update
- Jeff Garzik: network driver updates
- Urban Widmark: smbfs updates
- Kai Mäkisara: SCSI tape driver update
- various: embarrassing lack of error checking in ELF loader
- Neil Brown: md formatting cleanup.
pre2:
- me/Al Viro: fix bdget() oops with block device modules that don't
clean up after they exit
- Alan Cox: continued merging (drivers, license tags)
- David Miller: sparc update, network fixes
- Christoph Hellwig: work around broken drivers that add a gendisk more
than once
- Jakub Jelinek: handle more ELF loading special cases
- Trond Myklebust: NFS client and lockd reclaimer cleanups/fixes
- Greg KH: USB updates
- Mikael Pettersson: sparate out local APIC / IO-APIC config options
pre1:
- Chris Mason: fix ppp race conditions
- me: buffers-in-pagecache coherency, buffer.c cleanups
- Al Viro: block device cleanups/fixes
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS 1.1.20 update
- Andrea Arcangeli: VM tweaks
Re:Question for the Uber geeks.
by
MaxQuordlepleen
·
· Score: 2, Informative
not an uber geek but I'll give it a try.
Check the README in the kernel source directory for the list of required software for the 2.4.x series.
From the kernel version you are using I'd expect to be upgrading a whole lotta stuff
Re:Question for the Uber geeks.
by
chromatic
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Check out Documentation/Changes. You'll probably need to upgrade binutils, modutils, e2fsprogs, and PPP (if you're running PPP). The file has pointers to applicable versions.
If you're comfortable compiling a kernel, it shouldn't be any trouble.
I would have included the changelog and mirrors link, but I had not yet ever submitted a story to slashdot, and the thought of having my first try be successfull, AND about a kernel release at that was too overwhellming. I had been having problems with 2.4.10, so, I was often refreshing kernel.org with the hopes of a 2.4.11 magically appearing...how nice.:-)
And another link on an Internet 2 capable site
by
AmigaAvenger
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Re:Question for the Uber geeks.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Ditto, you'll probably need to change a bunch of stuff to make the transition from a 2.2 to 2.4 kernel, _unless_ your distribution came out late last year (redhat 7, for example) and it has most of the junk already in place because people knew in a general way what 2.4 would require. This link was posted on slashdot around the time 2.4 came out, and it has good instructions on compiling a new kernel, as well as what changed from 2.2 to 2.4.
cheers
Re:Where do I find more detailed changelogs?
by
worldwideweber
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There are a few changes to the emu10k1 driver that may affect you:
- Mixer improvements (should add support for treble, bass, volume, and others).
- Fixed a dead lock in emu10k1_volxxx_irqhandler.
- Small code cleanup.
-- w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Re:VM Changes
by
Ian+Schmidt
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Performance under my normal working set (KDE 2.2 w/default theme + Mozilla nightly version + the CRiSP text editor + KMail + XMMS + GAIM + several xterms, with occasional compiles and runs of very large apps like Wine and XMame) is substantially better (faster, smoother, way less swapping) on 2.4.10 vs. 2.4.9. I should note I'm running 512 MB RAM and 640 MB of swap on 2 partitions, and the system barely ever goes to swap now (with the previous VM, just starting up that environment got me into swap and it quickly maxxed out the swap from there).
So while I do appreciate Alan Cox's caution, the new VM works substantially better for me and I say "Go Andrea and Al!"
Re:Syncing with AC kernels
by
worldwideweber
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The two trees are very different in certain cases, and are likely to stay that way for a while.
The -ac tree has the following major additions:
- Uses the Riel VM (Linus uses AA)
- 32bit uid safe quota
- Ext3 file system
- PnPBIOS support
- Various PPro and Pentium workarounds
- Simple boot flag
- Faster x86 syscall path
- PPPoATM
- Elevator flow control
- DRM 4.0 and 4.1 support not just 4.1
- CMS file system
- Intermezzo file system
- isofs compression
-- w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Having a preemptible kernel makes things feel faster because what you're doing right now is getting serviced the most, but the overall system performance is actually decreased a bit.
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
by
jmv
·
· Score: 5, Informative
These sound real good. Is there a reason that these patches are not the default behavior? Is there a downside to having a premptible kernel?
AFAIK, there are two reasons why these patches aren't in default kernel. First, I understand that decreases latency at the price of slightly decreasing throughput. The second is that though the patch is small, its effects can be complex and nobody's too sure it doesn't have any bad side effects (crash, oops,...), especially on SMP systems.
Re:Question for the Uber geeks.
by
Enigma2175
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You could always try running the upgrade from a RedHat 7.1 disk. It has worked well for me in upgrading 6.2 boxes. It is also a hell of a lot easier than upgrading all the individual packages. IIRC RH 7.1 ships with the 2.4.2 kernel, an upgrade ro 2.4.x from that is a snap. Of the boxes I've upgraded, some have new, custom kernels and some are still running the stock RH kernel, which seems pretty solid. I did do an upgrade on one of the systems manually (not quite manually, lotta RPMs involved, some compiling) and it took at least 5 times as long as simply running the upgrade from a current CD.
--
Enigma
Re:VM Changes
by
TheGratefulNet
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm not sure I agree it works better.
I ran all the 2.4.x's, both at home and at work. I am a software developer (not kernel, though) and so I beat on my systems pretty heavily. both systems run dualhead X and my work system additionally runs hardware (dac960) raid. cpu is a k7 tbird, in the ghz range.
anyway, 2.4.9 was ok for me. I tried 2.4.10 and both my systems (home and work) locked up within days. hard tight lockup.
I brought both back to 2.4.9, and so far, so good (less than a week running, though; it was only a week ago I went to.10 and had those problems).
I, too, worry about 3k line commits to so-called 'stable' trees to radically change an algorithm or model. can't say for sure if.10 was really a dog for me, but my systems usually run for months and months before being rebooted (usually due to my swapping of pci cards and such, necessitating a shutdown to do the board swap). so it does seem unusual for me to have a modern linux kernel freeze on _both_ of my hard-working linux boxes. hmm..
--
-- "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
by
apwingo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The PE kernel work looks pretty good, but it's still got some kinks to work out in order to guarantee sub-5ms latencies. In a recent email to alsa-devel, Takashi Iwai posted the following tests with alsa and low-latency versus preemptible kernel patches. In summary, getting better, but not quite there yet.
I definitely agree with you though, the PE people's work is exciting, and much less of a hack than the low-latency patches. Way to go hackers!
Re:Question for the Uber geeks.
by
yanyan
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not THAT easily.. you'd most likely need to upgrade critical system tools and utilities like binutils, util-linux, modutils, maybe even gcc. For kernel 2.4.10, these are the needed versions of those and other packages:
The Changes file is more complete though.. read it to know the other changes you might need to make. Oh, and the recommended version of glibc for kernels in the 2.4 series is 2.2.x.. so you might want to upgrade that as well, though it isn't required.
first winmodem driver in the kernel
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Although the changelog does not list it, with the merge Linus did with Alan during -pre2, the driver for the IBM MWAVE chip found in certain models ThinkPad's of the 600 and 770 series was merged into the mainstream tree.
However up until -pre6 the config option is missing from the menu's (I doubt it was fixed in -final).
In Alan's 2.4.10-ac2 and later the config option is available.
there's been read-write driver since 2.2.x (at least) but it was marked experimental and could easily cause file system corruption. A lot of work is being done on write support right now. Of course since NTFS is undocumented and Microsoft keeps making subtle changes to it, it's very hard to get a stable read-write support. Read-only works perfectly though. I've used it myself way back when I had NT 4 on my machine.
-- ___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Unfortunately that picture is not at all of Andrea Archangeli, who is most definitely male. Sorry.
Re:VM Changes
by
jooniqzb1tch
·
· Score: 2, Informative
offtopic, but might help with memory issues..
you can check your RAM chips using memtest86 ( http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/ ). Using this program I could detect a very tiny problem in one chip that had caused one box to panic after over 20 days of uptime (also had an allocation problem message running 2.4.9 but linux wasn't the culprit). This is a good tool to have, specially now that we have these huge and cheap RAM chips.. a tiny bit that's fscked up in there can be a real mess. The only thing is this testing can take ages on older CPUs, altho major problems show up almost immediately.
thaught it could help some of you.
oom_kill()? Not in my kernel!
by
cbwsdot
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think that was one of the things causing some MM problems under heavy loads. Have they gotten rid of this yet? I think it was gone just after 2.4.10. But, I don't like the sound of "resurrect oom handling" in the 2.4.11 changelog.
-Chris
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
by
mcelrath
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I would expect that it would be enough to just change the time quantum from 1/100th of a second to, say, 1/5000th, by replacing the "#define HZ 100" in include/asm/param.h to "#define HZ 5000".
What are you talking about? The reason you get skips in sound and such is because the kernel hogs the CPU for a long time, using spinlocks (kernel 2.4) or by disabling IRQ's and then doing a bunch of processing (older kernels). It's particularly bad during I/O storms, and thus the bad vm lately has caused people to complain about audio dropouts. Changing HZ is not going to do anything but make the kernel less efficent. Note that the current default is 1024 for some archs, which corresponds to 1ms. Everyone sees latencies longer than 1ms on a regular basis, even with the low-latency/preempt patches.
--Bob
-- 1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Re:Thoughts on the 2.4.10+ VM
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Here's what he said exactly: The VM changes are gigantic and simply not IMHO appropriate for a stable kernel tree. http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/
I noticed exactly the opposite. w/2.4.9 I was experiencing almost daily lockups (hard ones, fsck became my friend). Today was my first lockup w/2.4.10 since I installed it. I was running a bunch of crap in X, compiling a kernel and upgrading to the latest and greatest Debian.
Machine went down hard as hell when I tried to logout of X.
I am currently compiling 2.4.11 so we shall see how that goes.
YMMV. Best of luck to you all.:)
Re:VM Changes
by
TheGratefulNet
·
· Score: 3, Informative
yes, memtest86 is very cool.
did you know you could make it a lilo target? makes things very convenient;-)
put memtest86 (the binary) in/boot and just add this to/etc/lilo.conf:
image=/boot/memtest86
label=memtest
its that simple. and its a great util. I've just not had the downtime to be able to run a real long memtest..
--
-- "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Re:OT: Which distro has a good installer?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you want to stick with a debian-based distribution, I recommend trying a straight debian install again.
After Mandrake pissed me off for the last time, I decided to give a bunch of distributions a try. This was earlier this spring, when a bunch of new distribution versions were coming out. I tried progeny, libranet, debian, redhat, mandrake again, and maybe a couple others that I can't remember.
The first time I installed Debian, I downloaded the stable iso's. I definitely didn't want to stick with stable, but I couldn't find an unstable iso, so I installed stable. I had problems with the dist-upgrade so decided to do a network install. Even though the Debian installer doesn't do much in the way of hardware detection, and it took a couple of tweaks to get everything right, I'm very satisfied now. All my boxes at home and work run Debian now.
Overall, if you want something that is going to auto-detect your hardware, and basically do the install for you, go with RedHat. If you want something that is going to be very easy to maintain, go with Debian.
Anyway, good luck with whatever distribution you choose
Re:OT: Which distro has a good installer?
by
ll5
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It is nice that you are still working on getting Linux set up! You might want to give progeny a go, it is based on debian but the install is much easier to get through. SuSE is not a bad bet, they have some realy nice tools for X configuration. As for mixing and matching distros, I would recommend that you stick with one setup. Some of the differences between distros have to do with the type of package management they use, whether they use custom kernels, the type of init scripts, how the packages were compiled, even the file system.That is probably not something that you want to mess with. Then again, maybe it is and you are just that brave...have fun.Take it for what it is worth, many people here will have valid arguements against any recommendation that someone else is willing to make.
You can read Win2k fine, but writing to 2k ntfs can be extremely dangerous and corrup the journalling..
-- XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
by
DGolden
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One thing to note, and I find myself saying this again and again, is that one of the simplest performance tweaks you can do is to negative-renice the X server. It's even mentioned somewhere in the X manual, and makes a hell of a difference.
This means that the GUI then pre-empts background tasks, like on Windoze, and other systems intended for desktop use. Of course you don't want to do that on a server machine, but only Microsoft are stupid enough to do it by default even on their "server" OSes.
I'd like to see "workstation" installs do it automatically, but there's a few small notes:
(a) if you renice it too low, it also ends up pre-empting audio tasks too much, and audio could conceivably skip when you move windows about. Shouldn't happen on today's reasonably fast computers. Easily fixed by careful tuning, perhaps including renicing important audio tasks too if your computer's really slow.
(b) If you're using the xfs font server, it needs tuning too - if it's starved of cpu time, then you might actually make text-heavy parts of the gui slower, not faster. I really wish distros would stop using xfs, since truetype support is now built into the X server, and server-side font support is being phased out thanks to XRender and Xft anyway.
-- Choice of masters is not freedom.
Re:Thoughts on the 2.4.10+ VM
by
Bishop
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Don't confuse NT's need for swap with linux. NT aggressively swaps everything to disk to insure that there is always lots of free ram. I believe win95/98 is worst. Linux (and BSD) on the other had only swaps when more ram is needed.
My main machine with 512MB ram rarely swaps. So rare infact that I can't remember the last time I checked and saw swap in use.
2.4.11 broke my nvidia card
by
mrklaw
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Anyone else out there find that after compiling 2.4.11 and then recompiling the nvidia kernel module X wouldn't work. I did.. I tried older versions of the nvidia drivers as well.
Oh well.. its back to 2.4.10 for me..
Re:reasons to upgrade..
by
Eil
·
· Score: 3, Informative
XFree 4.1 requires a v2.4.10 or v2.4.11 kernel to use DRI/DRM.
There's always the possibility that I could be missing something here, but... either I'm highly insane in you are very wrong. According to my XFree86 log, I'm running version 4.1.0 (Released on June 2, 2001).
Would not this mean that XFree 4.1 was released before there even was a 2.4.10 kernel? My X setup is the same one that came on Slackware 8.0, which ships with Linux kernel version 2.4.5. I've been playing Quake3 and Unreal Tournament on this setup for months now, DRI and all.
Slashdot Mirror
dude, that page is a year old!
.... pretty soon we'll be enjoying ext3 goodness out of the box. w00t!
on a related topic, I see the 7.2 directory on ftp.redhat.com
here to whore and to reduce stress on the servers!
final:
- Jeff Garzik: net driver updates
- me: symlink attach fix
- Greg KH: USB update
- Rui Sousa: emu10k driver update
pre6:
- various: fix some module exports uncovered by stricter error checking
- Urban Widmark: make smbfs use same error define names as samba and win32
- Greg KH: USB update
- Tom Rini: MPC8xx ppc update
- Matthew Wilcox: rd.c page cache flushing fix
- Richard Gooch: devfs race fix: rwsem for symlinks
- Björn Wesen: Cris arch update
- Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanup
- Tim Waugh: parport update
- Peter Rival: update alpha SMP bootup to match wait_init_idle fixes
- Trond Myklebust: lockd/grace period fix
pre5:
- Keith Owens: module exporting error checking
- Greg KH: USB update
- Paul Mackerras: clean up wait_init_idle(), ppc prefetch macros
- Jan Kara: quota fixes
- Abraham vd Merwe: agpgart support for Intel 830M
- Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader cleanups
- Al Viro: more cleanups
- David Miller: sparc64 fix, netfilter fixes
- me: tweak resurrected oom handling
pre4:
- Al Viro: separate out superblocks and FS namespaces: fs/super.c fathers
fs/namespace.c
- David Woodhouse: large MTD and JFFS[2] update
- Marcelo Tosatti: resurrect oom handling
- Hugh Dickins: add_to_swap_cache racefix cleanup
- Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update
- Martin Bligh: support clustered logical APIC for >8 CPU x86 boxes
- Richard Henderson: alpha update
pre3:
- Al Viro: superblock cleanups, partition handling fixes and cleanups
- Ben Collins: firewire update
- Jeff Garzik: network driver updates
- Urban Widmark: smbfs updates
- Kai Mäkisara: SCSI tape driver update
- various: embarrassing lack of error checking in ELF loader
- Neil Brown: md formatting cleanup.
pre2:
- me/Al Viro: fix bdget() oops with block device modules that don't
clean up after they exit
- Alan Cox: continued merging (drivers, license tags)
- David Miller: sparc update, network fixes
- Christoph Hellwig: work around broken drivers that add a gendisk more
than once
- Jakub Jelinek: handle more ELF loading special cases
- Trond Myklebust: NFS client and lockd reclaimer cleanups/fixes
- Greg KH: USB updates
- Mikael Pettersson: sparate out local APIC / IO-APIC config options
pre1:
- Chris Mason: fix ppp race conditions
- me: buffers-in-pagecache coherency, buffer.c cleanups
- Al Viro: block device cleanups/fixes
- Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS 1.1.20 update
- Andrea Arcangeli: VM tweaks
Photos.
not an uber geek but I'll give it a try.
Check the README in the kernel source directory for the list of required software for the 2.4.x series.
From the kernel version you are using I'd expect to be upgrading a whole lotta stuff
If you're comfortable compiling a kernel, it shouldn't be any trouble.
how to invest, a novice's guide
I would have included the changelog and mirrors link, but I had not yet ever submitted a story to slashdot, and the thought of having my first try be successfull, AND about a kernel release at that was too overwhellming. I had been having problems with 2.4.10, so, I was often refreshing kernel.org with the hopes of a 2.4.11 magically appearing...how nice. :-)
http://volcano.und.edu/linux-2.4.11.tar.gz
Ditto, you'll probably need to change a bunch of stuff to make the transition from a 2.2 to 2.4 kernel, _unless_ your distribution came out late last year (redhat 7, for example) and it has most of the junk already in place because people knew in a general way what 2.4 would require. This link was posted on slashdot around the time 2.4 came out, and it has good instructions on compiling a new kernel, as well as what changed from 2.2 to 2.4.
cheers
There are a few changes to the emu10k1 driver that may affect you:
- Mixer improvements (should add support for treble, bass, volume, and others).
- Fixed a dead lock in emu10k1_volxxx_irqhandler.
- Small code cleanup.
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Performance under my normal working set (KDE 2.2 w/default theme + Mozilla nightly version + the CRiSP text editor + KMail + XMMS + GAIM + several xterms, with occasional compiles and runs of very large apps like Wine and XMame) is substantially better (faster, smoother, way less swapping) on 2.4.10 vs. 2.4.9. I should note I'm running 512 MB RAM and 640 MB of swap on 2 partitions, and the system barely ever goes to swap now (with the previous VM, just starting up that environment got me into swap and it quickly maxxed out the swap from there).
So while I do appreciate Alan Cox's caution, the new VM works substantially better for me and I say "Go Andrea and Al!"
The two trees are very different in certain cases, and are likely to stay that way for a while.
The -ac tree has the following major additions:
- Uses the Riel VM (Linus uses AA)
- 32bit uid safe quota
- Ext3 file system
- PnPBIOS support
- Various PPro and Pentium workarounds
- Simple boot flag
- Faster x86 syscall path
- PPPoATM
- Elevator flow control
- DRM 4.0 and 4.1 support not just 4.1
- CMS file system
- Intermezzo file system
- isofs compression
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
Having a preemptible kernel makes things feel faster because what you're doing right now is getting serviced the most, but the overall system performance is actually decreased a bit.
These sound real good. Is there a reason that these patches are not the default behavior? Is there a downside to having a premptible kernel?
...), especially on SMP systems.
AFAIK, there are two reasons why these patches aren't in default kernel. First, I understand that decreases latency at the price of slightly decreasing throughput. The second is that though the patch is small, its effects can be complex and nobody's too sure it doesn't have any bad side effects (crash, oops,
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
You could always try running the upgrade from a RedHat 7.1 disk. It has worked well for me in upgrading 6.2 boxes. It is also a hell of a lot easier than upgrading all the individual packages. IIRC RH 7.1 ships with the 2.4.2 kernel, an upgrade ro 2.4.x from that is a snap. Of the boxes I've upgraded, some have new, custom kernels and some are still running the stock RH kernel, which seems pretty solid. I did do an upgrade on one of the systems manually (not quite manually, lotta RPMs involved, some compiling) and it took at least 5 times as long as simply running the upgrade from a current CD.
Enigma
I ran all the 2.4.x's, both at home and at work. I am a software developer (not kernel, though) and so I beat on my systems pretty heavily. both systems run dualhead X and my work system additionally runs hardware (dac960) raid. cpu is a k7 tbird, in the ghz range.
anyway, 2.4.9 was ok for me. I tried 2.4.10 and both my systems (home and work) locked up within days. hard tight lockup.
I brought both back to 2.4.9, and so far, so good (less than a week running, though; it was only a week ago I went to .10 and had those problems).
I, too, worry about 3k line commits to so-called 'stable' trees to radically change an algorithm or model. can't say for sure if .10 was really a dog for me, but my systems usually run for months and months before being rebooted (usually due to my swapping of pci cards and such, necessitating a shutdown to do the board swap). so it does seem unusual for me to have a modern linux kernel freeze on _both_ of my hard-working linux boxes. hmm..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I definitely agree with you though, the PE people's work is exciting, and much less of a hack than the low-latency patches. Way to go hackers!
Not THAT easily.. you'd most likely need to upgrade critical system tools and utilities like binutils, util-linux, modutils, maybe even gcc. For kernel 2.4.10, these are the needed versions of those and other packages:
gcc - 2.95.3
make - 3.77
binutils - 2.9.1.0.25
util-linux - 2.10o
modutils - 2.4.2
e2fsprogs - 1.19
ppp - 2.4.0
The Changes file is more complete though.. read it to know the other changes you might need to make. Oh, and the recommended version of glibc for kernels in the 2.4 series is 2.2.x.. so you might want to upgrade that as well, though it isn't required.
Although the changelog does not list it, with the merge Linus did with Alan during -pre2, the driver for the IBM MWAVE chip found in certain models ThinkPad's of the 600 and 770 series was merged into the mainstream tree.
However up until -pre6 the config option is missing from the menu's (I doubt it was fixed in -final).
In Alan's 2.4.10-ac2 and later the config option is available.
there's been read-write driver since 2.2.x (at least) but it was marked experimental and could easily cause file system corruption. A lot of work is being done on write support right now. Of course since NTFS is undocumented and Microsoft keeps making subtle changes to it, it's very hard to get a stable read-write support. Read-only works perfectly though. I've used it myself way back when I had NT 4 on my machine.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Unfortunately that picture is not at all of Andrea Archangeli, who is most definitely male. Sorry.
offtopic, but might help with memory issues ..
.. a tiny bit that's fscked up in there can be a real mess. The only thing is this testing can take ages on older CPUs, altho major problems show up almost immediately.
you can check your RAM chips using memtest86 ( http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/ ). Using this program I could detect a very tiny problem in one chip that had caused one box to panic after over 20 days of uptime (also had an allocation problem message running 2.4.9 but linux wasn't the culprit). This is a good tool to have, specially now that we have these huge and cheap RAM chips
thaught it could help some of you.
I think that was one of the things causing some MM problems under heavy loads. Have they gotten rid of this yet? I think it was gone just after 2.4.10. But, I don't like the sound of "resurrect oom handling" in the 2.4.11 changelog.
-Chris
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Here's what he said exactly: The VM changes are gigantic and simply not IMHO appropriate for a stable kernel tree. http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/
Many distro kernels don't have NTFS support compiled-in. If you haven't done so already, you may wish to compile 2.4.11 with NTFS support.
I noticed exactly the opposite. w/2.4.9 I was experiencing almost daily lockups (hard ones, fsck became my friend). Today was my first lockup w/2.4.10 since I installed it. I was running a bunch of crap in X, compiling a kernel and upgrading to the latest and greatest Debian.
:)
Machine went down hard as hell when I tried to logout of X.
I am currently compiling 2.4.11 so we shall see how that goes.
YMMV. Best of luck to you all.
did you know you could make it a lilo target? makes things very convenient
put memtest86 (the binary) in
image=/boot/memtest86
label=memtest
its that simple. and its a great util. I've just not had the downtime to be able to run a real long memtest..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
After Mandrake pissed me off for the last time, I decided to give a bunch of distributions a try. This was earlier this spring, when a bunch of new distribution versions were coming out. I tried progeny, libranet, debian, redhat, mandrake again, and maybe a couple others that I can't remember.
The first time I installed Debian, I downloaded the stable iso's. I definitely didn't want to stick with stable, but I couldn't find an unstable iso, so I installed stable. I had problems with the dist-upgrade so decided to do a network install. Even though the Debian installer doesn't do much in the way of hardware detection, and it took a couple of tweaks to get everything right, I'm very satisfied now. All my boxes at home and work run Debian now.
Overall, if you want something that is going to auto-detect your hardware, and basically do the install for you, go with RedHat. If you want something that is going to be very easy to maintain, go with Debian.
Anyway, good luck with whatever distribution you choose
It is nice that you are still working on getting Linux set up! You might want to give progeny a go, it is based on debian but the install is much easier to get through. SuSE is not a bad bet, they have some realy nice tools for X configuration. As for mixing and matching distros, I would recommend that you stick with one setup. Some of the differences between distros have to do with the type of package management they use, whether they use custom kernels, the type of init scripts, how the packages were compiled, even the file system.That is probably not something that you want to mess with. Then again, maybe it is and you are just that brave...have fun.Take it for what it is worth, many people here will have valid arguements against any recommendation that someone else is willing to make.
Wanna get high?
You can read Win2k fine, but writing to 2k ntfs can be extremely dangerous and corrup the journalling..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
One thing to note, and I find myself saying this again and again, is that one of the simplest performance tweaks you can do is to negative-renice the X server. It's even mentioned somewhere in the X manual, and makes a hell of a difference.
This means that the GUI then pre-empts background tasks, like on Windoze, and other systems intended for desktop use. Of course you don't want to do that on a server machine, but only Microsoft are stupid enough to do it by default even on their "server" OSes.
I'd like to see "workstation" installs do it automatically, but there's a few small notes:
(a) if you renice it too low, it also ends up pre-empting audio tasks too much, and audio could conceivably skip when you move windows about. Shouldn't happen on today's reasonably fast computers. Easily fixed by careful tuning, perhaps including renicing important audio tasks too if your computer's really slow.
(b) If you're using the xfs font server, it needs tuning too - if it's starved of cpu time, then you might actually make text-heavy parts of the gui slower, not faster. I really wish distros would stop using xfs, since truetype support is now built into the X server, and server-side font support is being phased out thanks to XRender and Xft anyway.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Don't confuse NT's need for swap with linux. NT aggressively swaps everything to disk to insure that there is always lots of free ram. I believe win95/98 is worst. Linux (and BSD) on the other had only swaps when more ram is needed.
My main machine with 512MB ram rarely swaps. So rare infact that I can't remember the last time I checked and saw swap in use.
Anyone else out there find that after compiling 2.4.11 and then recompiling the nvidia kernel module X wouldn't work. I did.. I tried older versions of the nvidia drivers as well.
Oh well.. its back to 2.4.10 for me..
XFree 4.1 requires a v2.4.10 or v2.4.11 kernel to use DRI/DRM.
There's always the possibility that I could be missing something here, but... either I'm highly insane in you are very wrong. According to my XFree86 log, I'm running version 4.1.0 (Released on June 2, 2001).
Would not this mean that XFree 4.1 was released before there even was a 2.4.10 kernel? My X setup is the same one that came on Slackware 8.0, which ships with Linux kernel version 2.4.5. I've been playing Quake3 and Unreal Tournament on this setup for months now, DRI and all.