Operational Testing of Linux Kernel 2.5.x

G3ckoG33k writes "The Open Source Development's Lab has begun operational testing of the 2.5.x Kernel: "The staff at OSDL has been involved with development and testing of 2.5 since the beginning and we've noticed that it seems to be very stable for a development tree. So good, in fact, that we think it is ready to be tested in a production environment. We have planned and begun execution of a project to test the 2.5 kernel in our data center using our production environment. The project includes lots of testing and lots of escape hatches so we don't run recklessly off the edge. We began with some of the simpler, less critical servers and, as we build confidence, are moving to the more complex servers. Today we have several servers running 2.5 and within a month we'll have most of the data center migrated to 2.5." Can anyone say Dare Devils?"

Comments

I like 2.5... I just wish I could clear up the FB

[miketang16]

I've tried compiling several different 2.5 versions, and yes they're very stable, when run in normal VGA mode... but I prefer the higher res FBdev mode. Unfortunately whenever I boot into a higher res, my screen either scrambles, or totally blacks out...

2.5

[Spy Hunter]

I have also been using 2.5 on my desktop. I got it at first to test out the supposed desktop performance improvements, but I haven't really noticed any improvement. What I have noticed is the increase in quality of the sound drivers. The new drivers for my card can suddenly mix 2 channels together in hardware, allowing me to run XMMS or mplayer and still hear my Gaim sounds in the background or visit a Flash site, without running a retarded sound server, or having programs choke and die because they can't open /dev/dsp. If only ALSA would implement a kernel-mode audio mixer so everyone could have as many channels mixed together as they wanted. We could get rid of this rediculous proliferation of bloated, incompatible "media servers" that use complicated IPC schemes to achieve basically the same result less efficiently. Here's hoping.

Re:2.5

[glenebob]

Yeah! Let's put the X server in kernel too while we're at it. NOT!

It seems to me that media services should either become embedded in the X protocol, or standardized as a sister protocol. The problem lies in the failure to properly standardize the protocols. The actual mixing can still be done in hardware when possible, but the applications should have a very standard way of writing to the sound stream and that it shouldn't be done in kernel. I'd rather write to $DISPLAY:$SOUND_PORT than to /dev/dsp or whatever. Try going the /dev/dsp route while using a remote X server (which is how I always access my Linux box). It might sound a little... distant.

Question

[RedBear]

There are those of us who like to mess with our Linux systems but aren't exactly experts and probably never will be. Some of us would really like to dabble a bit with the new 2.5 kernel on our personal systems, but we'd rather not hose our system in the process. Is there anyplace out there where someone periodically puts together a "semi-stable" version of the development kernel, that us dabblers can download and be reasonably sure that it will be free of such things as major filesystem bugs?

Everyone says, don't run the development kernel if you don't know what you're doing, and of course any particular 2.5 kernel grabbed off of kernel.org can be majorly broken, right? So it would be really cool if one of the real kernel developers could put together something inbetween the 2.4 "stable" kernel and the 2.5 "careful!" kernel. There are just so many cool new features in 2.5, like that huge improvement in interactivity that could really make the desktop more usable, but those of us who aren't experts are really leery to just grab the source and start compiling, because who knows what might be broken in any particular development sub-version.

Does anyone make a habit of doing this "semi-stable" thing with the development kernels? Failing that, are cool things like that interactivity improvement being backported to the 2.4 kernel already?

Re:Modules/drivers

[Zippy the Pinhead]

The kernel modules sytem was revamped, and is much nicer. But loading modules is now so easy to do, it would've been more hassle to emulate the old interface than to write new utilities.

The new module-init-tools are under:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/peop le/rusty /modules/

If you're running an RPM-based distro, you can get the latest modutils.src.rpm from there and use rpm --rebuild to recompile it. Bonus: it still has the old modutils, so you can dual-boot.

If you're running Debian Sid, you can apt-get install module-init-tools.

Re:I like 2.5... I just wish I could clear up the

[cymen]

I used to keep the console simple too except I've always had problems with this Dell Inspiron 4000 and display corruption when switching back and forth from console to X Windows. Recently I installed Slackware 9.0 and it uses the vesa fb by default (even for X!). I've been using it for a while and no display corruption at all. It works wonderfully and as a side benefit I get a nice big 1024x768 console fulling my LCD instead of some little odd looking 640x480 centered portion.

I'm a convert to the fb world. Of course I had to move X off of that vesa fb to the ati 128 driver but it was a pretty neat installation setup.