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Linux Kernel 2.4.21 Released

Posted by michael on from the load-average-increasing dept.

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.

2 of 539 comments (clear)

  1. Be gentle to the mirrors by Spock+the+Vulcan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Instead of downloading the entire kernel, download just the patch file if you are running the previous version. Then patch your source tree using:

    cd /usr/src/linux
    bzcat /blah/patch-2.4.21.bz2|patch -p1
    make oldconfig

  2. Re:Started to think 2.4.x was dead by gunpowder · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.