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Serious Bug In 2.4.15/2.5.0
John Ineson writes: "There is a bug in the latest kernel releases, that causes fs corruption on umount. A lot of people have already been hit by this, so for now I suggest you hold fire on booting those new kernels. More dead-duck than greased-turkey. Two possible fixes are being discussed on linux-kernel."
Colin Bayer adds links to a story at the Register and Al Viro's fix. Update: 11/25 00:39 GMT by T : Tarkie writes "Linux 2.4.16-pre1 is out, as detailed at NewsForge. If you've been having the filesystem corruptions, might be worth a try so that 2.4.16 can be out ASAP!"
has microsoft ever released a piece of software as bug-ridden as the 2.4.x linux kernel series?
but it has to be said: this would never happen with windows since MS have proper testing procedures.
Until Linux goes commercial, it'll never succeed.
Lets see if the open source community can solve a MAJOR file system bug in 24 hours. The same amount of time Apple typically corrects its problems. Boy, I feel sorry for anyone that lost its data to an open source OS. Makes the proprietary Mac OS X look real nice right now. Its never has had a file system bug of this magnitude. Now that I think about it neither has Microsoft. Man it must suck to be a 2.4-2.5 kernel user right now. So much for the superiority of Open Source. Just think, Red Hat's offer to install Linux in every classroom could have changed the standard excuse, "The dog ate my homework" to "The Linux corrupted my homework files".
Oops! I said something negative about GNU/Linux, guess this will be modded down. Got to love those file trashing open source operating systems and the holier than thou users (Is Stallman Pope of the movement yet?).
real fix is to install windows. Linux is a piece of shit.
Linux *never* has bugs, only Microsoft products have those! Right?
fucking Linux jackasses!
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
I can certainly agree with that if 2.4.x just came out (like in the 2.4.0-2.4.5 range). The thing is, y.[even].x was supposed to be the stable branch, not the experimental branch.
Meaning you don't introduce stuff unless is it really tested. Something like the USB stuff before it was backported to 2.2 series.
If 2.4 doesn't have the timetested guarantee, why should anyone believe 2.2 has it? Why not go with 2.0? Oh, wait, neither 2.0 nor 2.2 has some of the features that was introduced just for the enterprise...
Stop making excuses for the 2.4 series. It's been really shoddy. Doesn't reflect too well...
Je ne parle pas francais.