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Linux 2.2 and 2.4 VM Systems Compared

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hey-look-someone-did-actual-tests dept.

Derek Glidden writes "I got sick of trying to figure out from other people's reports whether or not the 2.4 kernel VM system was broken or not, so I decided to run my own tests, write them up and post them online. The short conclusion is that the 2.4 VM rocks when compared with 2.2, but there's more to it than just that."

2 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. why not more than one? by Karmageddon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    when I learned computer science--which I admit was a long time ago, but that means the "gurus" have all had plenty of time to catch up--they taught us that if you obeyed the principles of modularity that you could have more than one implementation of something and use what was appropriate for the particulars of a given situation....

    ...so why does linux have 1 VM? it seems that 2 of them exist, and the BSD's have more... guys, "gimme a hunk" and "page fault" aren't exactly rocket science anymore, particularly with hardware support... the fact that there is room to make a big deal out of this is the problem, not the VMs.

  2. The one major difference by matty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...is that Linux's warts are fully out in the open for all to see. Microsoft would never admit to such failings openly, even though anyone who has used Windows extensively is painfully aware of them.

    And it's been my experience that you don't hear, "Linux never crashes" that much anymore. At least I don't say it anymore, whereas I used to. I would still say that a properly configured Linux box is more stable than any Windows box, but I've had my share of lockups. (on the desktop anyway. You'll notice my server has been up for 140+ days. The last reboot was when the power supply died [it's a patched together P166] which interrupted 243 days uptime)

    All the mailing lists are public, and all of Linux's problems are there for anyone to see. This allows people to make truly informed decisions about which version of Linux to use, or whether to even use it at all. (Yes, of course these things are also true of *BSD) The current issues are why I still run 2.2.19 on my servers, since none of them get anywhere near enough load to need the newer VM's. "Stable" is definitely a relative term.