Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I've been running the 2.5 kernel on my laptop for a couple of weeks now to get the new cpufreq support. It seems to work really pretty well. Getting pcmcia-cs to build took some work, but I finally got it up and running and the performance of this new kernel is really nice, especially for the desktop.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
The reason it's not for production use isn't because it is necessarily crash prone... it's because it can break drastically between minor versions as features are added/changed.
There's a reason people don't use 2.5. It's the DEVELOPMENT kernel. You SHOULD NOT be using it for production use. Often things will break. Sometimes it will cause hard disk corruption. It wouldn't be the first time.
Please, fellow slashdotters, don't be tempted to use 2.5 for your important systems. It's good that it's tested more, but if you do use it, please don't bitch and whine about how it destroyed all your data.
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.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
This is however still a DEVELOPMENT kernel. I put that in big letters because it's very, very true. Lots of kernel modules won't compile still. Documentation for what has changed is somewhat spotty, and it took me some time to get everything working decently. And getting a system that can boot into 2.4 or 2.5 seems quite difficult with the new modutils package (or at least I haven't gotten it working yet - have to reinstall modutils RPM if I want to boot into 2.4).
Also there's a major bug with ext3 right now in 2.5.66 - if your computer doesn't shut down cleanly, the journal recovery in 2.5 seems completely broken - I have to reboot into 2.4, let the 2.4 kernel do the journal recover, do a clean shutdown, and THEN boot back into 2.5. Pain in the ass, especially since I've had two hard crashes since I upgraded to 2.5. Also 2.5.66 doesn't compile out of the box with default config. Had to patch one file with a patch from LKML.
So in short, 2.5 may be more stable than usual devel branches, but don't delude yourself about what you are getting into. If you want the latest and greatest in performance for your desktop machine, give it a try. But I wouldn't run even a low uptime-requirement server with it yet.
These are folks who don't include every driver and feature available. They probably won't be running preempt, which has been at times problematic. You can get a very stable 2.5 series kernel by being prudent.
All in all, my experience at running 2.5 has been positive, and my only problems have really been with features not likely to be used by folks running special purpose servers.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
"we've noticed that it seems to be very stable for a development tree."
And, in other news, Kernel developers worldwide learned that the development tree was too stable and announced sweeping changes to the VM, IDE, and Scheduler modules.
Said one developer, "it's not bleeding edge unless someone is bleeding. It pains me to think that we've actually got this thing stabilized with an odd-number dev version. We normally don't go for that until we go to the even-number release versions, usually at a x.y.5 or x.y.6 release."
I'm running 2.5.65-mm4 on my home box because i wanted to find out whats all the excitement and nice numbers about the new scheduler. After i got all the modules right, i did some tests ... and was a bit dissapointed. You see, it's not all that faster ... it just feels different. Yes, programs do load somewhat faster, but at the same time doing a ls -l in my home dir was kinda slower that with excellent WOLK patchset for 2.4.18. On the other side, i was completely able to browse my large inbox (~20k mails in maildir) while checking md5 of the latest knoppix iso on the same disk.
... i just can't wait to test the 'fixed up' promise driver and ide tcq code! Right now ide tcq on promise is somewhat borken. If ide tcq shows some numbers, that would be the last argument down for scsi vs. ide in our servers...
I have a lot of expectations of the Alan/Andre team with their ide work