2.6 and 2.7 Release Management

An anonymous reader writes: "A recent discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list debated whether the upcoming 2.6 and 2.7 kernels should be released at the same time instead of first stabilizing the 2.6 'stable tree' then branching the 2.7 'development tree.' The theory behind the proposition is to keep "new" things from going into 2.6 once it is released, focusing instead only on making it stable. On the flip side of this argument is the possibility that with a 2.7 kernel in development, there will be too little focus on stabilizing the 2.6 kernel. The resulting debate makes for an interesting read."

Comments

Re:Don't forget the past

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. The VM that came with 2.4 was so broken that we were seeing systems go down with massive data loss almost within hours of extensive use.

The old VM has 4 different major bugs:

1. Concurrent processes could not place deadlocks on sibling process in SMP mode.

2. Utilization of VM code on tread process in UP and SMP systems were so bad (under load - ( specially when the 4gig mem system was used )), that more preformance would have been got by running the 2.0 series rather than 2.4's VM.

3. No checks were placed in thread corruption and bucket fill code, which caused other nice things under load.

4. The enter beast was so unyeilding, it was known that the only one person who ever understood it, had to keep a journal just to keep track of the beast (Seriously). This was one of the major reasons that ticked off Linus and I believe the reason why he pushed the new VM.

But the 2.4 series was a major testbest. The moment we released it without having a 2.5 out, ppl started testing 2.4 in much more demand than they did the previous development series. This gave feedback in a week that we could not have got in six months for the development kernel.

The new VM has been stabilized and it's working wonderfully, if you use any kernel above 2.4.16, you should be fine.

jr