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Kernel 2.4.23 Released
MikeCapone writes "As if we didn't already have enough articles about Linux kernel releases, Marcelo Tosatti has released the final 2.4.23 Linux kernel. Check out the changelog at Kerneltrap."
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I don't want to sound like a troll, but does anybody else this comment is wholly inappropriate to be included in the text??
If I had written that as a post, I'd get tossed into -1, Flamebait before you know it. Yet the editors are seemingly bigger flamebaiters and trolls than the readers.
Seriously, if michael has such a problem with Debian, write a comment, and face the moderation and the replies. If he can't do that, then don't bother creating shit like that.
That's why you're not in charge of a mission critical production environment. Those who are know that an increase in performance is not worth a decrease in reliability. 2.6.0 is not going to be as stable and reliable as 2.4.23 is, just as 2.4.0 wasn't as stable as 2.2.18.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Did you miss the early 2.4.x kernels? The 2.4 kernel was nicknamed "the kernel of pain" for a reason. The VM madness was so horrid where I work -- it could be relied upon to clobber MySQL every time the load got moderately high -- that we immediately rolled back to whatever the latest 2.2.x kernel was at the time.
The fact that Linux is the product of an open development process certainly improves code quality, but it doesn't mean that all of the major bugs have been worked out before it's been subjected to the full power of real world production use.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Any mission critical environments should run a stable version of the kernel.
In this sense, they are more major than the 2.6 beta kernels.
I should not imagine even mission critical production environments sticking with 2.4 after 2.6 is released.
Nope. There is no way we will be moving to 2.6. The boxes we have running 2.4 now will be running 2.4 untill the day they die. I imagine any mission critical environments will be doing the exact same thing as we are.
With new servers you put into production, you may consider 2.6 depending on speed/feature requirements. But existing mission critical machines will never be upgraded.
Think about it, you have a machine and a system that is working. What exactly are you trying to fix? Make it faster? If it was too slow for you, you would have already bought more hardware. So, its not too slow, its been working fine and has been tested. You would have to be mad to upgrade the thing.
Mission critical boxes usually always keep the same kernel version until the day the die.
And what did you say your IP was again...? ;)
But... just because this release is going much smoother that doesn't mean your critic doesn't have a point. Regardless of how long 2.6 retains backward compatability with some aspects of 2.4's presentation to userland, there are some fairly fundamental things that are going to have to change for a system to be fully 2.6-ized. Devfs is being dropped for udev, swaths of proc are being moved to sysfs, and modules get a whole new userland tool. Now, I can boot 2.6 on my desktop and even run X with those unofficial nvidia module wrappers, but hde's performace is degraded despite hdparm's report of increased functionality and I can't run it on my powerbook without a hack to fix the keyboard. The userland stuff for udev hasn't even been written yet. If you've got anything under /etc that touches /proc you may have to rewrite it. Does your server hardware have the ability to monitor fans and temperatures? If so is that important as a failsafe for your uptime? Better check everything between i2c-foo.ko and whatever sends you mail 'cause sysfs has made it a whole new ballgame. Understand, I'm not saying that this kernel doesn't look born to win. It does. But look at your conf files for devfsd. Unless you've rolled your own distro odds are you've got all sorts of wierd tweaks to support a namespace that's lingered since 2.2. Raise your hands if you can boot your machine without "MKOLDCOMPAT"! (I especially love the "original 'new' devfs names or the really new names".) My point here is simply that 2 years after 2.4.0 made a better way of handling devices official the change is still being absorbed. That's not a bad thing. It just illustrates the conservative, one-step-at-a-time way that the whole system moves forward. Most won't stick a prerelease or even a 2.6.0 kernel on a machine that pays thier rent because they don't want to fix something that isn't broken.