New Kernel 2.4 Development Branch (-mjc)

Ivo writes: "kerneltrap is reporting: Michael Cohen announced to the lkml his intention to begin a new 2.4 development tree. The first release of his -mjc branch includes a number of performance enhancing patches, including Robert Love's preemptible kernel patch, Rick van Riel's reverse mapping patch and George Anzinger's real time scheduler patch. Michael says of this patch, "I feel that there's need for a rapidly developing '-ac [like]' tree, and so, here we go. Feel free to test it""

Comments

Re:2.4? 2.5?

[Zog]

Is -mjc going to keep up with the performance related patches added to 2.5, and backport them?

Most of the performace patches (pre-emptible, etc) are just patches to the current kernels that the stable kernel's maintainer hasn't accepted, for one reason or another. Chances are, they will go straight into 2.5 so that they can be tested and improved upon.

The reason for -mjc is to allow people to use the performance patches without having to worry about conflicts between the patches, applying them, etc - it looks just like a normal kernel package, except with -mjc at the end.

The -ac series follows the same guidelines - it tends to have slightly fancier features, newer drivers, etc. Every once in a while, when the stable kernel's maintainer decides that the -ac series is stable enough, a lot of the patches that went into -ac are put into the stable series, to get all the new drivers in there.

I doubt that will happen the same way for -mjc, since the patches are more along the lines of getting every little bit of performance possible, instead of having a wide testing ground for new drivers, vm's, etc.