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Linux Kernel 2.4.21 Released
An anonymous reader writes "After > 6 months of waiting, 2.4.21 is here. Lots of cleanups, and a patch which gives a MAJOR boost to the 'feel' of the system under heavy disk IO, especially on IDE systems. As usual, available from your local kernel.org mirror or ftp.COUNTRYCODE.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/! Tidbit: 'Current bandwidth utilization 131.72 Mbit/s '." See the Changelog for new stuff.
Instead of downloading the entire kernel, download just the patch file if you are running the previous version. Then patch your source tree using:
/usr/src/linux /blah/patch-2.4.21.bz2|patch -p1
cd
bzcat
make oldconfig
Bit torrent works best on large files. The source is only like 20megs. They could do it, but people should be only downloading the patch anyway.
-- taking over the world, we are.
$ cp linux-2.4.20/.config linux-2.4.21/
$ cd linux-2.4.21
$ make oldconfig
Im in charge of keeping production servers up to date. Im using a 2.4.20-rc7.
should I go up tp 2.4.21
If stability is important to you, you should only use proven, stable kernels on a production server.
Unless there is some new feature that you absolutely need RIGHT NOW and cannot wait, it is very bad to use 2.4.20-rc7 on a production server. The "rc" stands for "release candidate", which means that the kernel is almost ready to be used by the public, but needs people to test it first.
If you care about system stability, you should not be testing the kernel on a production machine. If you do want to test the kernel, do so on a test machine that is not a mission critical machine.
On several occasions in the past, a release-candidate kernel introduced new code which would crash or corrupt systems that used the kernel.
However, if 2.4.20-rc7 is not crashing on you, you don't need to upgrade to 2.4.21 right away. Review the kernel changelog, and see if any of the changes apply to you. Wait a few days (or weeks), and upgrade to 2.4.21 when it's convenient to you.
Personally, unless there is some urgent fix that I need in the new kernel, I always wait a few weeks or months before upgrading the kernel, just in case some wierd bug was introduced into the new kernel version. During those weeks or months, I usually test the new kernel on a test machine and see if anything wierd happens.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I can't believe some still don't get this:
As long as it's not available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org or http://www.kernel.org, there is no newer version of the linux kernel.
The same applies to the ftp://gcc.gnu.org and GCC (not the website, they are always a little bit lame updating it).
So if you say
'Mandrake has already put the "2.4.21" kernel in their 9.1 release'
your are wrong! They didn't. They lied to you. Or you are mistaken. Or they used a prerelease and renamed it 2.4.21.
And no, 2.4.21 it's not 'too late'. Look at the Changelog and what huge amount of bugfixing has been done. And all those updates to the drivers!
True, 2.6 will feature a log of nice extra stuff, but I guess 99.9% of all linux users are happy with just the features 2.4 has. They simply don't need support for NUMA, 64bit dev_t or Zero-copy NFS.
Red Hat 9 back-ported a disk scheduler which is a dog. either download this 2.4.21 vanilla kernel and compile it or recompile the default RH9 kerenl and remove the scheduler (I believe it is under General, been a while since I looked at this...the option right after the CPU info)
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
If the following are true, then the high CPU usage is expected:
-You have an IDE CD burner
-You are using IDE-SCSI emulation
-You are burning a CD with a blocksize other than 2048 (such as redbook audio, or (S)VCD, etc..)
If the above are all true, the ide-scsi emulation reverts to PIO mode. Supposedly this will be fixed for 2.6
Yippie! 2.4.21 is finally here! :) (I got it about an hour before the /. story showed up.)
:)
:) I'm going to try to get Slackware running on it. :)
They now have Opteron support in there.. I knew it was in the pre, I was just wondering if the new kernel or the rest of my hardware would show up first. I have everything for a dual Opteron system, except the processors and case. I'm so anxious, I'm going to burst.
( ) 386
( ) 486
( ) 586/K5/5x86/6x86/6x86MX
( ) Pentium-Classic
( ) Pentium-MMX
( ) Pentium-Pro/Celeron/Pentium-II
( ) Pentium-III/Celeron(Coppermine)
( ) Pentium-4
( ) K6/K6-II/K6-III
( ) Athlon/Duron/K7
(X) Opteron/Athlon64/Hammer/K8
( ) Elan
( ) Crusoe
( ) Winchip-C6
( ) Winchip-2
( ) Winchip-2A/Winchip-3
( ) CyrixIII/VIA-C3
( ) VIA-C3-2
I'm going to be a compiling fool when the rest of the parts show up.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I've never done this before, but I thought I'd give it a shot:
n t
http://66.227.104.34/linux-2.4.21.tar.bz2.torre
Even 2.0.X is still maintained. It currently stands at 2.0.40-rc6 (almost one year old).
http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/torrent/linux-2.4.21 .torrent
The past two thanksgivings have seen kernels released (2.4.15 and 2.4.20) with serious data-corruption-on-umount bugs.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid