Byte Benchmarks Various Linux Trees
urbanjunkie writes: "Moshe Bar has an interesting article, essentially benchmarking the standard kernel (with aa VM) against the -ac kernel (with Rik's VM)." He also raises some very interesting points about how patches (and entire development trees) interact.
2.4.9 was the last official kernel from linus which used Rik van Riel's VM which was introduced in 2.3.x. (The switch to Andrea Arcangelis VM occured in 2.4.9->2.4.10) Alan Cox and Red Hat used this in their kernels, and the Red Hat kernel was heavily patched with the patches from Rik van Riel which Linus "reportedly" dropped (among other things). The Red Hat kernel is also _very_ well tested, as all their kernels are. You might not like their distro, but their kernels are usually among the more stable.
(and personally, I'd prefer to keep -rmap separate for quite a while more ... development is much more efficient in a fork)
My -rmap VM is a patch against marcelo's standard 2.4 kernel, because that is the thing people have. It just doesn't make sense to release patches against kernels nobody has.
Also note that -rmap replaces pretty much all parts from the -aa VM I don't agree with, while at the same time integrating some parts from the -aa VM that I do like.