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Kernel 2.2 - It Lives!

Posted by michael on from the if-it-ain't-broke dept.

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?"

13 of 476 comments (clear)

  1. Why 2.2? by York+the+Mysterious · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. Several production servers by benevold · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Why? by este · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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]
  4. Linux's new target market by batobin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Linux's new target market by Osty · · Score: 5, Interesting

      more likely, are not educated on the benefits of upgrading.

      And those benefits would be ...? I was on the kernel upgrade treadmill for years, getting new versions as they were released, upgrading to 2.2 with the very first version, etc. It gained me very little. I reached a point where staying on top of kernel upgrades was more pain than it was worth, and stopped. Now I only upgrade if I need some new feature, better support for an existing feature, or for security reasons. Aside from security patches (which I would hope all of the "Windows Update"-ish tools would handle for these users already), 99.95% of all Linux users have no reason to upgrade their kernel, so long as they're using a sufficiently modern one to begin with. Why, then, is it such a bad thing that these users don't know how to upgrade their kernel? If anything, I'd say it's a testament to Linux that users running it can get by without ever having to touch the kernel (aside from maybe loading a module or two when they get new hardware, though even that could/should be automated).

  5. My main reason for keeping 2.2 around... by samrolken · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  6. Need 2.2 for microsecond packet timing. by Chmarr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. Linux 2.2.x? by JWSmythe · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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.. :) The CPU went up from an AMD 300Mhz to AMD 450Mhz.. hehe. Free upgrades are the best, right?

    --
    Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  8. On the flip side of the coin.. by XaXXon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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..

  9. Re:Simple by AchilleTalon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I still have my 486 with 16MB memory running a firewall/DSL router. It is now near 10 years old and still running. This machine is never powered-off, unless there is a black-out. The only problem I had was with the CPU fan I replaced many years ago and the power-supply fan I replaced about two years ago.

    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!
  10. Re:Kernel Series 2.2 by rmadmin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?
  11. Re:Kernel Series 2.2 by dfries · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  12. Bridging firewalls! by Krellan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I run a 2.2 kernel, with the patch for Ethernet bridging and firewalling.

    http://bridge.sourceforge.net/


    http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/mailman/listinfo/bri dge


    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!