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Kernel 2.2 - It Lives!
Build6 writes "For those of us still using 2.2 (how's that for "conservatism" eh?) -- 2.2.24 is out (and has been since last week) - see kernel.org for downloads. I see networking code tweaks, but no changelog. Time to give our old RH 6.2 machines one last kernel-recompile before Red Hat's end-of-life date arrives for 6.2? :-) What I'd like to know is - who else (besides me) out there still has machines running 2.2 and intends to keep it that way?"
This is a real question not flame bait. Why would you keep 2.2? What is there in 2.4 that makes it so bad? It seems like it's pretty mature now so what's wrong with it?
-Tim
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
Although we are slowly phasing them out we are running quite a few machines, mostly redhat. Because of they are critical systems they have yet to be upgraded. There's one debian box that's been up for over 500 days and the kernel wasn't upgraded for a while before that! For some reason it seems to be the most stable box we have.
I get asked all the time.
:-)
I've still got 2.2 on my laptop, and really, I'm happy. I don't use it for much more than mobile internet access, and as tightly compiled as I have it, I don't feel a need to go through and upgrade. Just that much more work for an overall unimportant change, a least in this situation.
Of course, my desktop has 2.4.
[este]
I have no idea what number it is but it runs my Mac Performa 6360 which is acting as a router. The 2.4 kernel panics anytime it tries to access the cd drive or I look at it funny. Don't get me wrong here, I use 2.4 on everything except in this one case.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I'd say with everything I'm reading about Linux's new target market, a lot of people will leave their kernels. Why? Because they either don't know how to upgrade, or more likely, are not educated on the benefits of upgrading.
Honestly, with the advent of Linux being sold at K-Mart, used in schools, and wielded by mouse-clicking Grandma's, there are bound to be lots of people who don't know they should upgrade their kernels. I personally think marketing Linux to these markets is important, but an equal amount of importance should be recognized in educating these new users in the basics of maintaining these systems.
Because what good is the open source movement if the end user doesn't know how to benefit from our work?
I run 2.2.23 on my 8 Processor Sparcserver1000E (with 2GB Ram)...
:(
I can't use 2.4 (or 2.3) because sun4d SMP support got broken for 2.3 and never got fixed. If I use anything except 2.2 I can only use one CPU
Yup, same here. RH 5.1 just keeps on trucking. Has worked great for years and there are so many little tweaks and hacks in the config files I really don't feel like rebuilding it from scratch.
:(
Linux zeus 2.0.39 #1 Mon Oct 8 00:19:52 CEST 2001 i686 unknown
The sendmail vulnerability may be the nail in its coffin tho
I don't really have a choice. It's well-known that the 2.4 kernels can't compile properly for the 32-bit sparc architecture. http://www.rocklinux.org/mailing-list/rock-ports/2 001-7/5.html
--
Sam Kennedy
samrolken
I've written a little application around libpcap that needs the microsecond resolution for packet arrival times. 2.2 has that. 2.4 only gives me 10 millisecond resolution.
People still use 2.2.x?
Just kidding.
As I recall, I had some old old Slackware machines . I don't even remember the version number, but I think they started out with a 2.0.x kernel. On most of our machines, I didn't really want to take them down til they died of old age or whatever (usually we wanted faster machines over time), but kept upgrading the kernels on some occasionally for new features.. As I recall, we just couldn't get the 2.4.x kernels to even compile on them, without library upgrades, which I wasn't prepared to do (and probably mess up) on a whole bunch of machines.
But, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there with 2.2.x still, who haven't had a need to upgrade. I was just working on a machine a few days ago, that is, and there's no need to upgrade, it works fine.
> uname -a
Linux foo.bar.com 2.2.13 #3 Sun Nov 21 18:45:36 EST 1999 i586 unknown
That machine is still running strong. We just upgraded the CPU, motherboard, and memory, but it was all compatable with the drivers that were compiled in back in 1999..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I've got a Redhat 6.2 machine running 2.2.21... and I doubt if I'll even update it to .24. The only reason it was upgraded to .21 was because I swapped out the 10mbit network card for a 100mbit.
:D
It's been running fine pretty much non-stop for 4 years now. The only time it ever is rebooted is when the power goes out (yeah, I know...)
It's rock solid, and serves as my apache and SSH server to the outside and my FTP, MySQL, NFS, Telnet and AppleTalk server to the inside. To top it off, it's running SETI@Home and it's on a P120 with 32 megs of RAM, with no swap space being used. Not too bad, in my opinion.
Unless I suddenly get a big outgoing bandwidth upgrade, and an increase in activity to go along with it, I don't think I'll ever be upgrading this machine
dennis
It will almost certainly remain a viable contender for certain embedded and esoteric applications.
Why? I'd really like to hear why you think that. You offer no "why" in your post. This is not a flame or anything, I'm just VERY curious why you think this.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I just upgraded to 2.5.64 with Linus's patch ( mentioned yesterday) merged in.
I am running Gentoo and I first installed the gentoo-optimized 2.4.20 kernel. When I read the article yesterday I decided to make the jump to 2.5.64 + patch. Holy wow, Batman.
I'm running Gentoo under VMware on a dual 2.2 GHz Xeon (only 1 processor makes it through to the virtual machine, though). After figuring out that I needed new modutils, I had everything up and running. I started up a kernel compile with make -j 2 to really try and saturate the system, and moved the mouse around. The mouse was silky smooth, KDE quickly and properly recognized mouse-overs and everything was just so nice. I then booted back to 2.4.20 and ran the same test. Oh the pain! The mouse was chunky, KDE didn't even try and do mouseover animations.. it was horrible. I've switched grub to default to the 2.5 kernel and I'm not going back.
That said, this is a play machine and does nothing important. So if it crashes more often (no crashes yet), then it doesn't really bother me..
That's what was available when I threw out NT4. I didn't like the "SCO way or no way" snd FreeBSD-2.2.2 was pretty sucky. Slackware something in a Sam's Slackware Unleashed" book worked, and it's been running nameservers ever since (with the requisite yearly reboots).
Actually, the reason Linux is not on the Netcraft top 10 list is given on their website:
"Additionally HP-UX, Linux, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days."
Plus, some of those BSD/OS boxes on that list have been running for like 7 years, which is before Apache was even ported to Linux... crazy
Lewis, which was featured here on /. sometime ago, is still running red hat 6.2. And I don't know of any software upgrades our lab will be giving him any time soon.
I have a simple rule. When I have a box of year 19XX, then I try to give it an OS of year 19XX and preferably the applications of year 19XX. (BTW, for the picky ones, same is true for 20XX :-).
.... (fill in your dots).
The advantage is that you get good performance and that the drivers still understand old hardware like
So my Advantech 486 / 64MB IPC is still running fine as a firewall / DNS-server, with two ISA-based 3COM 509Cs. And given my rule above, it is of course running a 2.2 kernel, in this case RH 6.2.
My desktop (P5) is running Debian (also 2.2 kernel), but on the other hand my more recent notebook is using RH 8.0 (Linux 2.4).
Performance wise this is all pretty optimal, the only worry that you can have is that those older configurations are not coping with the latest virus attacks. Anyway, so far, so good......
Willem
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Linux Kernel 2.2.X has been continuously updated on this machine without a glitch.
This machine has seen pre-1.0 kernels and was my first PC. I just don't remember the very early Linux distributions I tested on this machine. For sure, Slackware was installed on it at some point in its life.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I'm still running a 2.0 kernel on a production Slackware 2.3 machine. The reason for that is that I'm afriad of breaking the antique software package on the system by upgrading, but it seems I will have to do something soon since OpenSSH will no longer compile on the machine, and I don't feel like leaving it open to the world.
Can all fish swim?
Bah! A 486 can easily handle a moderate (small office) amount of machines on a cable connection. We had one at a previous job (486dx33, 16MB RAM, no hard disk) that MASQ'ed/firewalled for 15 machines - it didn't break a sweat. I have an old P90/32MB on my DSL line (internal ADSL modem) with extensive firewall rules, acts as the smart mail relay and it also runs apache when the main server is down (minimal config - no CGI/PHP). It's never anything close to busy. Mind you, I think it's close to death now - it normally takes 3 attempts to boot, and I can hear the fan if I listen closely even though its up in my attic! I'll really have to back up the drive one day - took me about a week to get it working just right - that ASDL card was a real bitch...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
According to my personal experience with 2.2, if you do a lot of small memory allocations and bring the machine very close to the limit (including swap space), the system will eventually stop working, perhaps not crashing, but not responding to rsh/telnet.
... Repeat that until even 1 byte is not available. Store all the pointers and, between mallocs, access to all the memory correctly allocated before.
I remember that I even wrote a small C code to reproduce the problem. In summary: Alloc M bytes of RAM. If they are available, ask for M more. If not, ask for M/2, M/4
The problem disapeared with 2.4. This holds at least for the old versions of 2.2 we used, I don't know if it has been fixed.
I recently deployed a new dial-up server at my work using Slink Debian, kernel 2.0.38. The machine is a 100Mhz 486 with 8MB of RAM. It's deliriously stable, and runs all the software we need on it (mgetty, atftpd, cron, and some sh scripts). Why would I go for a kernel that requires more memory (Debian 2.2+ wouldn't boot in 8MB of RAM), when the tried and true works great?
Much as I hate to admit it, the household server is still running 2.0.36. IP masquerade and firewall for the household LAN's Internet access via cable modem, Samba print service for the other machines, backup storage for kids' schoolwork, and an antique version of Apache whose main function is to provide access to the Perl scripts that allow multiple people to share an old SCSI scanner. Haven't had a monitor connected to it for years, and the BIOS is old enough that you can tell it to ignore the fact that the keyboard check fails at boot time. The old AT power supply comes back up without any manual action after a power failure -- no idea how many of those it's been through, but the ext2 file system doesn't seem to have ever lost anything.
I'm running 2.4.18 on my Telephone so I'm not so sure how long 2.2 will last in the embedded market either.
Wow. 14 days between reboots? 90-day uptimes? Might I respectfully suggest that something on your systems sounds entirely broken?
Out of a pool of about 12 heavily-loaded servers that have been running for 4 years on 2.2 and 2.4 kernels, so far, I have had exactly *one* need to reboot that couldn't be positively traced to hardware problems. And that time I'm not entirely sure that it wasn't hardware-related, I just couldn't *prove* it.
The couple of times there have been hardware problems have been because of things like failed RAID cards or power supplies. I could count the number of incidents on one hand, and have at least one hand left over. A couple of the machines, in the 3 or 4 years they've been in service, have only been rebooted to switch colo facilities (twice) and for batched kernel+critical software (libc) upgrades (two or three times).
The last time I switched colocation facilities, *ALL* of the machines had been running for over a year. The thought of rebooting them never crossed my mind. And while some of them were very robust systems (triple-redundant power supplies, etc.), most of them were plain old commodity machines that I slapped together on my desk.
If you're really having to reboot those machines like that, you probably want to dig deeper and find out what the problems are. Chances are it's not just that one kernel version is more stable than another, it's that one kernel version doesn't exacerbate underlying, pre-existing problems as much as another.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I use NBD (network block device) combined with software RAID1 to give automatic mirroring of data across 2 machines.
Unfortunately NBD in 2.4 simply _doesn't work_ - the client (with the nbd.o module) dies as soon as you try to transfer any significant amount of data (~4Kb). How it could have made it all the way to the stable kernel is beyond me, even with 2.4's reputation.
I've tried unapplying the NBD sections of each relevant patch since 2.2, (all of 2.4 and 2.3 series) to see where it broke, without much luck so far. I've worked out that the current behaviour has existed since 2.4.4. I got all the way back to 2.3.46, prior to which (haven't tried any earlier yet) it doesn't compile properly.
In short, yucky. So much for our backup solution on a RH6.2->RH8.0 upgrade...
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
I am running a 486 sx33 that will basically only run 2.0. why on earth would I want to upgrade it? It runs vi, minicom, and gcc in about 40MB of hdd space. I couldn't even get a 2.2 to boot on this thing =)
Just using it to test new digital circuits.. an old-school laptop can still drive TTL in and out of the parallel port and act as a digital scope well enough.. even had it running dos and djgpp+rhide a while back.
Seriously, why upgrade when you consider all the headaches involved with dependencies.. My workstation is still on 2.2.18, although with 6 compilers and libraries installed, it is getting very close to reinstall time.
-Slackware junkie since '95.
I ran a 2.4 kernel on a box that was largely unchanged from its original Slackware 3.2 install from November 1997. There were a few minor changes along the way to keep up with the kernel, but nothing massive.
Last year, I upgraded it in place to Slackware 8.1 by methodically installing new packages. Those old versions didn't have upgradepkg, so you have to install a few things (like pkgtools) before you do anything else.
After finishing with that and running the new version of LILO to set up the boot environment, I rebooted. It came back up, and life goes on with a modern box that isn't limited by libc5 weirdness.
You can do it. Just be slow and methodical and remember to install the new base before removing anything from the old one. That means installing all of the new libs (glibc, etc) before even thinking about touching the old packages.
By the way, I did all of this in multi-user mode since I was coming in via ssh. It worked fine.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
When kernel 2.6 comes out, no doubt we'll all cootchy-coo over it and quite a number of us will run to download it simply because it has a lot of improvements and because it's the most functional kernel. And yet in four, five or six years' time those same people would probably recoil in horror if they found out that someone is "still" using 2.6 because "everyone knows" that some newer kernel is "so much better".
If something works now, why won't it work in a few years time with the same hardware? If stability is important to you, isn't it better to stick to something tried and tested?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I run 2.2.18 on an ancient sparcstation used as a small traffic web and cvs server. It just passed its 397th day of uptime.
I run a 2.2 kernel, with the patch for Ethernet bridging and firewalling.
i dge
:)
http://bridge.sourceforge.net/
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/mailman/listinfo/br
It seems that the new firewalling technique of 2.4 (iptables) does not play well with Ethernet bridges.
I have a DSL connection to a small subnet of static IP addresses (/29). The problem is that the DSL uplink, out of my control and unfirewalled, is on one of the addresses in my subnet! It's as if there is a fox in the henhouse.
There is no proper routing subnet, as there should be. This is no doubt because of the IP address shortage. The DSL uplink must exist on the same subnet as my machines, giving me only 5 usable addresses for my machines. Broadcasts must be passed correctly, or the machines won't be able to ARP each other. Proxy ARP is not an option, because of the need to keep the DSL uplink on the same subnet.
So, I run Ethernet bridging with firewalling. I bridge two Ethernet cards together, passing broadcast packets between them (filtering out externally generated "smurf" broadcast packets, of course). I also implement my firewall at this point. The network is one logical LAN, but partitioned into two physical LAN's, with the firewall machine in between them. The firewall makes sure that unwanted packets from the DSL uplink never reach my machines.
It's not perfect (there is no stateful connection filtering), but it has worked well for me. Probes come in at least every hour, and no successful breakins to my knowledge.
And another reason not to upgrade? The machine's uptime is now at 326 days, I'm going for the year
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
The Agenda VR3 runs 2.4.0-test9. And the Agenda Community is working on Kernel 2.4.19/20 for VR3.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/agos
What do you mean, 2.2? Seriously, the "server" in my parents not-so-small medical cabinet connects to 5 serial terminals and a couple of printers and card readers. I set it up in 1998 (downgrading from SCO ;-) and it's been running ever since, litterally 24x365. Not one single crash. It runs 2.0.35.
2.2 is still quite viable for use on production servers. At my former employer, the mail system (4 MXes, 2 outbound SMTP boxes, 2 POP proxies, and 2 backend mail spools) still runs 2.2 because it has been utterly stable (2.4 is pretty stable now too, but for a long time 2.4 was held to be too volatile for production use by many people, and more than a few still think so).
The default kernel remains 2.2 in Debian Stable, as well. On my personal machine I run 2.4, but if I were installing to a server that had no need for USB, etc., I would think about using 2.2 even now.