2.4 Kernel Maintainer Marcelo Tosatti Interviewed

Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has an interview with Marcelo Tosatti. Marcelo became the maintainer of the 2.4 stable kernel when he was 18 years old, releasing his first kernel, 2.4.16, on November 26'th of 2001. Two years later, he recently released 2.4.23 and plans to soon put the 2.4 stable kernel tree into maintenance mode, only addressing bugs and security issues. Living in Brazil, Marcelo currently works for Cyclades Corporation. In this interview he looks at how he became the 2.4 maintainer, the challenges involved, and brings us up to date with the current status of the 2.4 kernel."

Comments

2.4 VM problem with big machines still there

[Anonymous Coward]

For most people (read: desktop, small server stuff) the 2.4 kernel might be the right thing and having no problems. If have highmem-machines (>= 1GB RAM) things look very different.
I run a very big (2 HT CPUs, 4GB RAM, 620 GB RAID5, 2x 1GBit links) file-server and all 2.4 kernels (.19-.22) weren't able to run the thing stably for more than 1 week, under heavy I/O load not more that 2 days.
Changing to the -aa tree helped and that thing is now up, stable and fast for past 4 months.

The problem lies in still unmerged code for highmem and slabcache reclaim (check /proc/slabinfo or use slabtop), which is in the -aa tree for ages.
I reported that to Marcello, but he seemed very uninterested in tracking down (many, many thanks to Andrea and Rik, who helped) and applying those particular fixes in the -aa tree.