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2.4, The Kernel of Pain

Posted by jamie on from the my-destiny-to-be dept.

Joshua Drake has written an article for LinuxWorld.com called The Kernel of Pain. He seems to think 2.4 is fine for desktop systems but is only now, after a year of release, approaching stability for high-end use. Slashdot has had its own issues with 2.4, so I know where he's coming from. What have your experiences been? Is it still too soon for 2.4?

3 of 730 comments (clear)

  1. Problems? With Linux? No!?! by edashofy · · Score: 1, Troll

    "However, after about a month into deployment I started noticing strange problems with the machine. Intermittent lockups were the most common. The lockups appeared physical, and the machine was unrecoverable without a reboot.

    While performing research on the problem, I learned there was a serious sync() bug in the 2.4 kernel. This bug exists in all kernel 2.4 versions until 2.4.6."

    Intermittent lockups? Serious bugs in the kernel? For five straight minor releases, no less! This is beginning to sound like Windows! Where are the trolls who post about the Open-source movement completely preventing and/or eliminating this sort of thing?

  2. No probs here. by arsaspe · · Score: 2, Troll

    I run Linux 2.4.16-pre1 on both my desktop machine and a server and have never had any probs (except for the odd system slowdown due to ext3 sync()`ing, but winME was much worse.) Ironicly, I run windows XP as a NAT server on my dialup box, because it also has to run some windows-only software that doesnt like wine. It took me HOURS to get the bloody thing setup and working, and I spent another 3 hours downloading all the patches, plus a virus scanner (AVG... very good- www.grisoft.com), ZoneAlarm, and then had to wrestle with XP's bullshit "User friendly" configuration while it told me that everything I did wasn't a good idea. After all that, XP's built in 'firewall' (which is on even though I turned it off) conflicts with ZoneAlarm, and constantly locks down all internet traffic, requiring a reboot. It also runs like a sloth with 520mb ram on a 1.5 ghz p4. And to top it all off, XP constantly refuses to connect to my ISP... which are running "Incompatible" windows2000 servers.

  3. You linux d00ds are so far behind by smnolde · · Score: 0, Troll

    Why not go directly to 4.4-STABLE or chance 4.5-PRERELEASE? It's definitely nice and stable. Much better than 2.2 or 2.4.

    # uptime
    7:39AM up 31 days, 7:46, 8 users, load averages: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00

    #uname -a
    FreeBSD somewhere 4.4-STABLE FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE #10: Sat Dec 1 13:37:45 EST 2001 root@gw.smnolde.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/FIREWALL i386

    Well, maybe I am trolling, but you linux d00ds still don't get it.