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?"

Comments

Why 2.2?

[York the Mysterious]

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

Several production servers

[benevold]

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.

Why?

[este]

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. :-)

Linux's new target market

[batobin]

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?

Re:Linux's new target market

[Osty]

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).

My main reason for keeping 2.2 around...

[samrolken]

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

Need 2.2 for microsecond packet timing.

[Chmarr]

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.

On the flip side of the coin..

[XaXXon]

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..

Re:Simple

[AchilleTalon]

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.

Re:Kernel Series 2.2

[rmadmin]

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.