Slashdot Mirror
Kernel 2.2.12
DrunkenBastard writes "I just noticed that a 2.2.12 kernel was starting to appear on the kernel.org mirror I usually frequent.
" When I saw this submission, the first thing I thought was "And me with my 38 day uptime". That confirms it. I gotta go out ;)
If you can keep your computer running for long periods of time without rebooting, it proves that you can keep your computer running for long periods of time without rebooting. Anything assumptions further than that are, well, assumptions. I can leave a machine online for years running MS-DOS. If I choose to do so. Many operating systems have impressive 'uptime' statistics when used in applications (i.e. 24/7 server tasks with many users) where it matters. They'd totally fall down in certain other applications. An example of this is my laptop. I ran Linux, and then NetBSD on it for quite some time. It's just a little 486 laptop with 28 Megs of RAM. But having to power it up and shut it down every time it was necessary to disconnect it for longer than the battery would sustain it grew to be a pain. And using power-down/resume was problematic as the OS's clock 'went to sleep' for the whole time it was off. The CMOS real time clock was only read to initialize system time in a bootup sequence. I figured out to create a cron job than would call a system function to bring the system time into sync with the hardware clock at regular intervals. This resulted in a little 'flash' sequence anywhere from one to several minutes after a power-up, when the machine discovered it was far later than it had presumed. This somtimes kicks in other cron jobs, invokes the screen blanker rather suddenly, etc. My conclusion after awhile was that I was running a system with basic infrastructure design to be a system left running all the time. It didn't handle well at all being used intermittantly. I don't know (I could have looked, certainly) what cron jobs might have been scheduled to occur at Midnight or One AM that it never ran (most 'distribtions' have some cron tasks set up for offpeak hours, that many users never even query to discover) The lesson isn't that Unix type systems are bad. It's that they are suited for some purposes and ill suited for others. People can contort machines like the Palm Pilot to get a Linux system to run on them, but it's basically a dog that can play cards. The dog isn't good at playing cards, it's just impressive that it can play at all.
I compiled and installed 2.2.12 as soon as it was released as most previous 2.2.x kernels have had problems with fs corruption, mem leak, and nfs. With 2.2.6-11 I ran "sync;sleep 120" scripts to keep them happy. I still have a lot of 2.0.x boxes at work, and use my desktop workstations at home and work to test stability. After running 2.2.12 for a couple of days now I will probably recompile a dialin box and a couple of others as it seems pretty stable to me.
The WinTrolls continue to be active, but now they try to boost their credibility by stating half-truths and wild assumptions instead of totally bogus arguments.
:^)
I crashed my Linux box twice today. Is it that I'm extremely unlucky, or that you're extremely lucky, or something altogether else? That's the problem with anecdotal evidence.
Your problem is that the vast majority of 'anecdotes' says something different. Many of those companies switching ever to Linux for technical reasons just don't fit into the 'Linux zealot' category...
And why don't you name your Linux problem??? If you pay $5000 for the Slashdot Technical Support service, we might be able to help you
In fact, alleged Linux problems often turn out to be hardware related or faulty X servers.
>The NT servers require a reboot every month to 6
>weeks for one reason or another.
But no reason that you want to enumerate.
In my case this happens often because some random memory leak apparently slows down heavily, without any obvious reason.
eah, it MUST be that -- it couldn't be that NT might actually be pretty stable
Sure it is - if you already consider WinXX stable, then NT is pretty good in comparison. It's just that Unix guys have a different notion of stability..
I HAVE tried that test.... NT ran and ran and ran.... Linux fell over without any provocation. I may not be an admin for a huge company, but I know what I see. You anti MS morons are always picking up on stability and security as connected with NT but you are always very quiet when Linux is concerned.... Take a look at all the millions of security patches for RedHat _6_ which is new for god's sake! There are too many semi-skilled programmers working on Linux for it ever to become stable and secure. Most all crashes on NT and Win 9x are caused by software. Jesus you are stupid! The reason Windows crashes more often is that it is far easier to program a decent appearing program in VB or Delphi but with some nasty code flaws that can crash the system... The base OS and all Microsoft products have been carefully debugged - no crashes. If there were some easy development environemtn for Linux, then crashes would become far more common. Wake up, smell teh bacon and realise that Linux is just an interesting footnote in history. If I had to choose, I would use Windows 2000 (which simply kicks ass - Beta 3 uptime: 123 days , no crashes or restarts since installation, running IIS 5, serving a live web site) or perhaps BEOS 4.5 (which is nice and well developed, not some nasty collection of 20 year old unuix bullshit) NEVER linux.
(damnit, I forgot that this editing window corrupts text if defaults aren't over-ridden. How about changing the defaults so it's at least as polite to whitespace as LaTex??)
If you can keep your computer running for long periods of time without rebooting, it proves that you can keep your computer running for long periods of time without rebooting. Anything assumptions further than that are, well, assumptions. I can leave a machine online for years running MS-DOS. If I choose to do so.
Many operating systems have impressive 'uptime' statistics when used in applications (i.e. 24/7 server tasks with many users) where it matters. They'd totally fall down in certain other applications.
An example of this is my laptop. I ran Linux, and then NetBSD on it for quite some time. It's just a little 486 laptop with 28 Megs of RAM. But having to power it up and shut it down every time it was necessary to disconnect it for longer than the battery would sustain it grew to be a pain. And using power-down/resume was problematic as the OS's clock 'went to sleep' for the whole time it was off. The CMOS real time clock was only read to initialize system time in a bootup sequence.
I figured out to create a cron job than would call a system function to bring the system time into sync with the hardware clock at regular intervals. This resulted in a little 'flash' sequence anywhere from one to several minutes after a power-up, when the machine discovered it was far later than it had presumed. This somtimes kicks in other cron jobs, invokes the screen blanker rather suddenly, etc.
My conclusion after awhile was that I was running a system with basic infrastructure design to be a system left running all the time. It didn't handle well at all being used intermittantly. I don't know (I could have looked, certainly) what cron jobs might have been scheduled to occur at Midnight or One AM that it never ran (most 'distribtions' have some cron tasks set up for offpeak hours, that many users never even query to discover)
The lesson isn't that Unix type systems are bad. It's that they are suited for some purposes and ill suited for others. People can contort machines like the Palm Pilot to get a Linux system to run on them, but it's basically a dog that can play cards. The dog isn't good at playing cards, it's just impressive that it can play at all.
I have had problems with previous kernles, so I am upgrading in hopes that they are fixed. There are also some tcp/ip fixes that are in 2.2.12 that area slightly different from the 2.2.11 patch, that hopefully will be better. 2.2.11 was up for 1.5 days when the machine froze, then I got the patch and was up for 2 days, then started testing various kernels for other things. I now have been up 10:48 houre:minutes
Only 'flamers' flame!
2.2.12
uptime 10:49 hours:minutes
Only 'flamers' flame!
Sincerly I'm an upgrade freak. At the moment our mirror gets 2.2.12 I'll upgrade my machines. But not because I need to. Just I'm in my nature I love to experiment. Frankly my job is to know what goes on the edge so I'll be ready for the future.
2.2.x kernels are mostly stable to work on Internet since 2.2.9. Frankly even 2.2.5 is stable in 80% of the tasks. The 2.2.10 is pretty good for regular and intensive desktop work. At least in a "multimedia horse", "Windows-like" working environment, I have noted a good robustness on it: 2 crashes in almost 2 months.
The only point I would see useful for using the last kernels would be in a server environment. However that also depends on the tasks. A 2.2.3 kernel worked with a few occasional bugs for nearly 4 months in a small web server. The main problem were some memory leaks form time to time.
Note that Linus has announced code freezing for development kernel 2.3 in two weeks. So in late Fall we probably will start seeing the new 2.4 coming up. No matter the cooleness one should be aware that each kernel jump is usually traumatic. Sometimes app code needs to be rewritten. People need to hunt for new features between new and old code. Today there is a strange fever of upgrading. And, recently, many newbies seem to have been caught in it. They don't understand why but they go with the fashion. When 2.3 bug-fixing starts up many may fall on the error of following up the vets and face some serious consequences.
You should test all of your procedures regularly. This includes reading backup tapes, restoring from backup, and yes, gaaaaasp, rebooting the system. You really don't want to find out that you've got the order of things wrong in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d at 3 am, or peak load on friday. Murphy happens. Things get bit rot. Un-accessed sectors go bad. Firewall changes do things that suprise you (happend to me).
Ok, I know this is blastphemy, but you really should reboot your systems at some regular interval unless there have been *no* system changes.
I guess on a *really* static system you could get away by bringing it down to level 1, fscking, and bringing it back up, but why not just be safe and verify that everything comes up even after all the electrons get drained out.
Fire away...
-- cary
YES SEGFAULT IS EXTREMELY GAY
I'm an administrator running a Samba network (Linux server running as PDC) serving over 100 NT clients. We tell them not to reboot. However, after about a week or a week and a half of uptime, most of them have to be rebooted anyway because of strange errors and BSOD's. I'd say at least one or two of them BSOD's a day out of them.
These are Dell machines with all the "right" hardware in them.
Well, dialup services don't take all that much cpu out of the system.
We've got a squid proxy server that's been up for 80+ days, that's rebooted because of power problems. That server gets a lot more traffic, but I liked the higher number on this one, "for effect" or something like that.
Here it is. Our squid proxy server:
Allie:/home/edgy# uptime
9:56am up 91 days, 23 min, 8 users, load average: 2.09, 1.78, 1.72
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Oh yeah, another app that crashed the system all the time was soemthing called "explorer.exe..."
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I don't know who this is, but I have been checking the kernel list archives, and there's no mention of anything like this.
Linux isn't about vaporware, like some software companies.
I think it's 49.7 days.
-matt
Not only are you a liar, your stupid too.
I'll ignore that, other than to say I think you are too much in touch with your j key. Given the rest of your post, I can only wonder what you're doing with it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When calculating system uptimes for use in discussion, I always quietly omit reboots due to kernel upgrades from the equation!
While a machine is running memory can be fragmented and leaked, resources left allocated when they should be freed, and many other problems can occur that only manifest themselves once they have acumulated above a limit. A machine that runs for a long time with no reboots demonstrates an OS or kernel that doesn't suffer from these problems. Any reboot - even after 200 days can mask a very slow problem that may eventually choke the machine.
Anytime you reboot you must restart your uptime count - even if it was scheduled downtime. If you don't you are kiding yourself about the stability of a system. This is true for NT, Linux, and any other system.
Your comment that MS-DOS will run for prolonged periods of time is incorrect. Back in the 80's I ran a slough of DOS machines, and after a while, usually a week or so, of uptime, they locked up. All of them, no matter what version, or what processor. I used to tell the folks around me that they just wouldn't run for that long without a reboot.
I now have nearly a year uptime on one of my Linux boxes, finally proving that if your machine can't stay on, it's SHITWARE. Get over it.
That feature is in 2.2.13, FYI. Check the linux-kernel mailing list archives.
That feature is in 2.2.13, FYI. Check the linux-kernel mailing list archives...
I think Andover.net should take pity on the guy and buy out his site. Put segfault out of its misery. The user comments here are a hundred times more funny than the 'humor' on segfault.
I apologize for my brusqueness, but perhaps you could spend a little less time masturbating over your uptime stats and a little more time making sure that this web site is actually up and working?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Don't work so hard, just boot the new kernel under VMware and try it out. Your uptime will be fine and you will be able to enjoy the new code without a reboot.
:)
Hedley
Believe it or not, 2.2.12 seems to be one of the most stable kernels out of the 2.2.x series I've seen. Just about every single other one has had various problems, from TCP/IP memory leaks, to data corruption, to other problems.
:-)
Even the high load server we're running here that had some network flakiness was fixed when we upgraded to 2.2.12 (in hopes that this would fix these problems). It did. We're lucky.
Linux rulez, d00d! My system uptime is now almost 1000 days!
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Well actually,.. I shut my system down every night (moved into my own appartment,.. pay my own bills.. no freeking way Im going to pay for my computer to be on when its not in use!!! LOL) So its not a problem.. New kernel comes out.. take a min to get the patch,.. start recompiling (make clean && make zImage && make modules && make modules_install && cp arch/i386/boot/zImage /boot/linux-2.2.X) and go read slashdot, chat on irc .. or one of my other standard activities.. I dont even notice the kernel compiling in the background except for the hard disk making a lil noise (Yes I do have a lot of ram this is why I bought it :P)... what is that.. 1-2 mins of my time? Shut the system down at night before I goto bed.. turn it on after I come home from work.. walla new kernel.. and no fuss.. works great, gets stains out, revives your sex drives and grows hair! :) But the point is,.. in THIS situation it can be done almost automatically.. no fuss... and if the kernel was to fix something bad.. it gets fixed.. if it brakes something.. ohh well I still have my previous kernel, and if it was pointless? Ehh big deal its done anyways and took hardly any of my time :)
I HAVE tried that test.... NT ran and ran and ran.... Linux fell over without any provocation.
;)
Please, tell us another one. I have never ever seen a linux machine fall over without provocation. And get this, I'm not a Linux zealot. I'm an MCSE that really likes Linux. That's all. I now have 90% less headaches since we've migrated our operations here from NT. Our web servers are co-located at an ISP 50 miles away and the machines run and run and run and run. The only time a system goes down is if there is a total power failure or someone hits the reset button (I'm gonna disable it.) The ISP is an all NT shop... remember I just said about that reset button? They hit it on our system because they go right down the line and reboot the systems almost every friday because they don't want their pagers going off because a string of NT boxes fall over.
Take a look at all the millions of security patches for RedHat _6_ which is new for god's sake!
Now, now. You are showing yourself as an MS zealot. Millions of security patches for Red Hat 6? Wow, Red Hat has a bunch of busy RPM makers. C'mon and get real. Those patches showing up quickly is one major reason why we decided to switch to Linux. The patches show up within hours or at the outside days. Microsoft has known about some bugs for years but ignore them.. you know about that nasty little problem with Access don't you? And what about general system security? Heck, it was the Cult of the Dead Cow that really put MS on their heels. If the CDC didn't start hammering I really don't think MS would have responded to security as they have.
There are too many semi-skilled programmers working on Linux for it ever to become stable and secure.
Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox are semi-skilled programmers? All I can say is ROFL. Ohhh-my.
Most all crashes on NT and Win 9x are caused by software.
Whoooah, deep insight. I'll give you a hint the software that crashes NT and Win 9x is the OS itself.
The reason Windows crashes more often is that it is far easier to program a decent appearing program in VB or Delphi but with some nasty code flaws that can crash the system.
Hmmmm, you're telling us that the programmers at MS are using Delphi and VB to develop apps?
The base OS and all Microsoft products have been carefully debugged - no crashes.
Ohh-my. I just hate to keep pointing out your zealotry.
If there were some easy development environemtn for Linux, then crashes would become far more common.
Now I presume that you're talking about what you don't understand. From my experience and from everyone else that I know personally that runs Linux, we have never had the whole system go down because of a misbehaving app in user space. Incase you don't know, NT oft falls over because graphics driver access goes all the way to the kernel not through the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). You see MS is trying to make NT the OS for every reason. Hey, if they do it.. doesn't bother me. I just don't see it happening. They sacrificed stability for speed when it came to graphics. They wanted the graphics workstation market too, the same market enjoyed by the likes of Sun and SGI but video hardware available for the PC wasn't of the same caliber as the big boys so they bypass the HAL for extra speed. 'Fore I digress much further.. there are some easy to sue IDEs for Linux. Cygnus Solutions has one. Check it out.
Wake up, smell teh bacon and realise that Linux is just an interesting footnote in history. If I had to choose, I would use Windows 2000 (which simply kicks ass - Beta 3 uptime: 123 days , no crashes or restarts since installation, running IIS 5, serving a live web site)
Aaaah the zealotry. I have smelled the bacon and it's being fried by IBM and SGI. They are rolling out support for Linux as never has been seen before and I love it. They are open sourcing (especially SGI) components that will really make Linux rock. You plan on deploying on the Merced? If so it looks like you'll have a heck of a time deploying Windows2000 on it. Linux already runs on it from what I've heard.. if it really doesn't yet, Torvalds has already stated that it won't be a major mountain to climb to do the port. Please tell me, will NT (W2K or whatever marketing changes the name to.) be Merced ready in 64 bit mode? I've got major questions about the 123 days uptime. And what? You don't give the URL to the live web site? C'mon. You're goading without putting anything up. Hardly seems be like a confident MS zealot. Err, or is it exactly like an NT zealot?
or perhaps BEOS 4.5 (which is nice and well developed...
Can't disagree with you there. The BeOS is a very well designed system. I just hope their TCP/IP stack is robust before you try to deploy sites on it. By the way, have you ever really run the BeOS? Or are you just bringing it up to appear educated?
One final question... Is it because you don't know anything about Linux that you dislike it so much? It doesn't appear that you're not highly knowledgable about NT either and you like it. Oh-well. I'll let others figure that out.
yup since yesterday... tho u have to think it trhough, meaby just the patch? or go through the whole thing! and mess around with the sound modules an so on... i guess i should have waited some more... hmmm
People should not be trumpeting uptime as a measure of stability but actually how stable the machine is. If I run the exact same thing over and over again, it is not to demanding on a machine's os. But doing wildly different tasks all at the same time are. For example, instead of trumpeting, my email server has been up for 490490 days, instead see if that computer can handle sending 100 email messages to 1000 people on the network all at the same time. Or saying that your workstation handled a C++ compile, a 3D render and 10-20 instances of netscape running java apps all at the same time. I know Win95 will without a doubt lock up if I go anywhere near the compile button while rendering in Truespace.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Ever hear of TESTING a kernel before putting it into full production use??
We would do that, except if they reboot every night, sometimes certain services don't start up properly. As I recall, the netlogon service wouldn't always start up reliably, so we just gave up on it, and have the people reboot as rarely as possible.
That won't be true of everyone, though. There might very well be stuff in the patch-2.1.12 file that Alan Cox missed out of his patch series, or fixes which work slightly better than the ones AC collected. For such people, I can see some value in moving to 2.2.12, especially if they don't need any of the supplementary kernel patches that I gratuitously throw in for good measure.
But I would caution, as others have, against upgrade fever. I used to suffer from this, and still have over 2 gigabytes of software upgrades I've never gotten round to installing. Many of those upgrades are probably now out-of-date, themselves. It's an exercise in futility and it's only reward for me has been frustration. I've started getting into the habit of only upgrading what I need, plus supplementary packages, libraries, interpreters and compilers. It's made my life a lot easier.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You cannot connect linux uptime with slashdot uptime. There are many things other than the base operating system that could be causing problems.
Heck, we've got Rob's perl scripts, mysql, apache, and a multitude of other programs I'm sure.
What the NT bigots don't mention is that it's impossible to get Windows NT to do what slashdot does on the same scale out of the box, at least.
Windows makes the easy things easy. Unix makes the hard things possible.
If it's beneficial we usually call it something like 'a good habit' or 'insisting on excellence', rather than the negative 'addiction'.
The reason for the near hypocrisy when NT-run sites are down vs. UNIX-run sites that are down is that OS users are bigots (most of them anyway) and maintain that their OS of choice is the best in the world, half the time without really ever using anything else or having any real world experience to know what else is out there. I must agree that there are complete idiots out there who fancy themselves administrators of computing systems just because they have that level of privelege at the login screen of WinNT.
I administer both systems and while my slant is towards UNIX, we have NT servers in 6 buildings that do not crash and have, in some cases, over a year of uptime. Now granted, all they are doing is file serving and DHCP so its not exactly a sweeping stability victory for NT to say it doesn't crash on these boxes. But the secret is hardware, at least in my experience. If you buy decent hardware that is certified to work with NT, it greatly improves the stability of the OS.
Now the email server that runs on NT (Netscape Messaging Server) - thats a different story. It was done before my time but its definitely entropy in action.
My motto has always been to use what does the job best for you. For some, that may mean using NT. They will sacrifice some stability and scaleability for the (sic) "ease" of use and stupid wizards (my own bias slips through..). For others, a UNIX system does the job best. Though graphics may never see the light of day on my DNS server, I wouldn't trade BIND and the command line on it for anything NT has to offer.
KmArT
Oh well. I'm sure as heck always going to download the whole tree, even if it does take an hour to get it using my 33.6 modem.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
well we all know linux is a good opperating system... do we really need thousands of people proving it with their uptimes? i'd agree... for a workstation, uptime really doesnt matter.
Depends what sort of services you're running: if you're just doing file & print to an 20-person office then it's fine having scheduled downtime. If you require 5 9's availability then it ain't.
--
Cheers
Jon
Cheers
Jon
It actually came out on the same day as 2.3.15. 2.0.38 also came out on the same day...
OK, I've seen this post enough, who exactly is MAE LING MAK, and why do you want to see her naked?
An act of nature in the form of a multi-hour power outage cured me of that problem. The UPS can only hold out so long before it runs outta juice :-) I had to check one last time before shutting down by candle light. Just over 112 days, not even notable compared to some of the year plus uptimes out there but it freed me to do upgrades and experiment with new, buggy video drivers.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
Better yet use downtime and figure it in percentages rather than time since last reboot. It'll keep you honest and not desperately grasping for 100, 1000 or 10000 days ;-> uptime.
There is a problem with watching uptimes, you watch it and become increasingly proud of how long your machine has been up for. Bragging rights, etc. YOUR UPTIME COMMAND CLOUDS YOUR JUDGEMENT! Please reboot your machines when you have to. Don't become an uptime sucker and wind up with some catastrophe happening because you didn't get a much needed patch to stop your old HD from exploding into flames.
SHE writes bitchin' stuff for segfault. (And SHE wears chains!)
--
ALWAYS CAPITALIZE MAE LING MAK!!!!1!11!!
Those who like Katz's postings, please don't flame me. I like 80% of them myself.
---
Stephen L. Palmer
http://midearth.org
Just another BOFH.
I don't understand why you couldn't do that, I mean, I have my theories and I don't see why they wouldn't work, but I'm no kernel hacker.
So I don't see why if the kernel controls everything, it could just stop scheduling processes while it updates itself.. A kernel-helper could move in and takeover to assist the rewriting of heart of the system.
Or perhaps, a totally modularized and reduntant kernel. While the memory manager is updating it could evilly use swap while it updates, or perhaps simply doesn't any processes that would want to use memory to be scheduled to take place..
Also hooks could be put in to show where you could overwrite, and also tell how much it can overwrite before going out of that parts' space and you could supply a goto kludge until you can lock and rewrite the kernel? :)
geeze, i don't know.. Why can't they do it? This looks like something that should be worked on for 2.6 or 3.0
fou aje oym asoyf ueyf jaffaq afset su!6j!/\ op 'ua>|7!>| ppn7
Well I lie about my uptime.
/proc/uptime
# vi
When calculating system uptimes for use in discussion, I always quietly omit reboots due to kernel upgrades from the equation!
Is this cheating? I dunno, but it seems reasonable enough... - I view an interrupted uptime as due only to OS crashes, power failures, hardware failures, and the like. In other words, when something's fscked up.
Is this a good way to look at it?... Hmmm... Pro'lly not.
As soon as Linus / Alan figgers out how to upgrade an entire kernel from source without rebooting, I'll be happy! ; )
What's the deal with Slashdot lately? Windows2000Test is reliable compared to Slashdot as of late it seems. No it isn't my connection...I can ping Slashdot just fine several times a day but port 80 isn't connection whatsoever (and it isn't congestion).
Almost seems a bit...interesting...that this is happening so quietly while every NT problem, be it hardware, idiotic admins (there's a lot on this planet), or just a user mode app crashing is doom for Microsoft because NT SUCKS!. Note that sarcasm mode was on.
Just meandering.
Why not split that 13 meg tarball kernel into seperate architectures to cut down on the bandwidth problem? If I'm compiling a kernel for i386 why should mips/ppc/sparc/sparc64/alpha/etc also be included? Sure it would complicate the mirror system a little, but in the long run I think its worthwhile.
Too bad segfault is never up so one can't find out what SHE has to say.
Even with the "errata" patches, it does horrible things to your daemons. The system will respond to pings and apache will accept connections but not serve any files. At least that is what happened to my webserver... TWICE! An unloaded box ran fine though so it must be something to do with system usage. The box was running 2.2.9 fine with 45 day uptime or something. 2.2.11 crashed in about 36 hours. Some advice to people who run Linux on important systems: don't trust the kernels. They are not stable. New features and optimizations are thrown in right and left without testing. Wait at least 2 weeks before upgrading. Check the newsgroups for comments about stability.
"When I saw this submission, the first thing I thought was "And me with my 38 day uptime". That confirms it. I gotta go out ;)" Sure, 2.2.12 might be out, but do you *really* need to upgrade to it? This revision might not even fix/update anything that you use. Recompiling your kernel just because a new version came out is like warez'n'hackz kiddies making sure they always have the latest 0-day. I mean, I see alot of people who just recompile simply so they get a new spiffy version number. Well, if you ask me, it's a sad addiction to recompile if the changelog doesn't effect you. It's sad to see /. promoting such behaviour with comments as quoted above.
In an "Emergency Situation" it's good to have the entire kernel source. Also how about "Well, I forgot to download TCP/IP, damn, i'm screwed"
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
As an AC said, the kernel is already splitted. It's called patches. Haven't downloaded the source since 2.1.x something.
If all kernel structures were linked up into a well-defined tree and all hardware state changes were recorded there then it wouldn't be all that hard to change the kernel while running live, at least in concept. The trouble is, this wouldn't express the way certain changes are interrelated at a strong or even absolute atomic level -- you'd need checkpointing to guarantee that, plus possibly transaction logging if you want to slip the new kernel in between checkpoints.
Hmmm, an interesting problem though.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
FWIW, I have a couple of 386's with DOS 5.0 running business (point-of-sale, inventory, &c) applications written in Clipper and FoxPro. No Windows, nothing exotic. A quick look at the reboot logs showed uptimes of typically 60-90 days. IIRC, most reboots have been due to power interruptions (no UPS, either!), although the last one was caused by (my) operator stupidity :-).
I would consider that cheating. Uptime is only uptime.
cpeterso
I wasn't exactly baiting (hell, for one I apologized for my phrasing beforehand, and if I really wanted to, I woulda said something like "dump linux and apache for NT and IIS"), but there have been some big problems with Slashdot's website being down the past few days. I just find the average "luser" fascination with things like "uptime", "beowulf", and "squid" annoying. My mindset is more along the lines of, "Hey, could you iron out the problems and get it working and then play with your buzzwords?"
Not that I really blame whoever moderated me down -- it wasn't exactly the nicest thing I've ever said.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
does rob even read his own site any more ? Someone else updated a previous Post yesterday about 2.2.12 being out. This was on the post about 2.0.38 and 2.3.15 coming out...
The changelog takes a few days to be milked out of http://edge.kernelnotes.org The kernel programmers are too lazy to do one themselves apparently. Sometimes you get release notes from Linus though, usually about it being blessed with something penguinish.
Until then you can just use the 2.2.x patch browser at http://www.kernelnotes.org/v22patch/ (click on the breakdown)
Whatever is shown got tweaked a little (or a lot). You can figgure out where the changes were made quickly. Finding out what the changes were requires more effort however.
~Kevin
:)
There is a nice thing called anacron that is not assuming the system to be on 24h.
Uptime is `uptime`. Nothing else.
What you are talking about is "runtime since last crash/unwanted reboot".
I've read on some other message board about a company that reboots their NT servers nightly. I guess they get quite impressive "uptimes" (in your definition) this way.
If we didn't know the guy using winders as a server that crashes every 3 or 4 days. Or our mom and pop using windows asking you to fix AOL becuase it crashed windows, again!, we wouldn't be stuck up on uptimes. Blame it on windows you must brag about up times!!! And when you see a winders users yell at them and tell them:
"It is becuase of people like you that use a crappy os that I feel the need to take pride in how long my computer is up without a reboot!! DAMN YOU!!! DAMN YOU TO HELL!!"
And start flinging brunt copy of linux at them. Aim for the eyes or head, it hurts more. Then sit down, chill, and run "top" and watch your uptime go up and be happy that you don't have to reboot to change the ip on your nic!!!
MarNuke
and I've never seen that happen with any other OS. You can't blame it on power glitches either, because everything is UPS'd, and anyway, the Linux and Solaris equipment is powered from the same sources and it stays up just fine.
And BSODs and running out of virtual memory happen almost as frequently. I can't imagine why your NT machines are stable, but it certainly isn't representative of our (very large and multiple) sites -- I can very easily relate to the slagging off that NT gets for lack of stability, through personal experience.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Sound like too much work to me. I'm speculating that 90% of the users would be just as happy if someone wrote a utility to set the uptime and produced a website carefully detailing why "setting your uptime after installing a new kernel should not be considered cheating".
"FCC grants FBI new authority to tap digital and wireless phones."
Why bother with Congress, when you can give each other permission?
Put the minor kernel updates on the sidebar, between faq and hof.
The line should be:
98% of the rants about NT's purported instability and lack of security are the direct results of complete idiots that MADE it.
Funny, I can put a linux box in front of my friend that never had a computer and doesn't know anything about computers but everyday when he comes home to use it it's on and working fine but the windows box next to it crashes everyday. I'm not some idiot. I understand the registy and how to make things works. The thing is I fix one thing then something else that has not ties to what i just fix breaks.
You want to do a real world test??
Try this one time. Get two machines that are the same in everyway. Install NT on one. Linux on the other. Do everything stock with no changes what so every. Just install it with nothing special. Simple right? Now let both machine sit. Just doing nothing what so every. Since you are an admin or make your self out to be one. Which one would crash first?
What ever machine failed, it can't be blamed on the admin. It can't be blamed on the hardware. It can only be the people who made the OS.
Don't tell me it's was a user error. You can get 100's of 1000's of people at random to install linux then NT and I'm sure that NT will 99% of time fail first.
Oh btw, 100% of my linux crashes has been becuase of something I did. Not the software. Of course I have only crashed my 11 home systems 3 times total in the one year I have been using Linux and all of them was becuase I was trying something completely new to me.
Windows 98 crashed 20 times in 24 hours.
MarNuke
So you want online kernel upgrades? Sounds like something we do with our systems at work: At EMC, we will upgrade the OS that runs inside our storage systems while the system is online and processing I/Os. (I haven't worked on the code that does the online upgrades, however.)
It's not easy to do, but it can be done.
The tricky part is not the replacing of the kernel code with new code, but migrating between changed data structures at the same time. In theory, you could do it with the facilities in place now:
1) Build the new kernel.
2) Build a program that understands all the differences in kernel data structures.
3) Load the new kernel into memory, but at a different address from the running kernel.
4) Load the translation program as a loadable module--it will need to do several steps:
a) suspend interrupts
b) translate the data strucutres
c) relocate the new kernel to the proper place in memory (possibly using VM tricks)
d) enable interrupts
e) clean up any junk from the old kernel that is no longer in use
f) transfer control to the new kernel
5) Unload the upgrade program
That would be a pain to code, but in theory is possible. For most applications, though, rebooting is acceptable. I doubt that anyone will code online kernel upgrades anytime soon.
I've been running 2.2.12 for 1 day, 6 hrs, 50 mins. What we have here is a lack of COMMUNICATION!
-Will the Chill
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
I believe the figure of uptime is how well computers can do when on for long periods of time. When you reboot you reinitialize the state of the hardware as well as software so any problems like memory leakage, fs corruption, etc stops when you reboot.
If you can keep your computer on for long periods of time without rebooting not only means you have a good OS it may also show the skill of the administrator. Not to say you are a bad administrator when you reboot.
The problem with using uptime as a bragging right is that it is not much to brag about when we talk about workstations. It is important to upgrade the hardware and kernels of workstations so reboots may be frequent depending on the type of user. For "static" mission critical severs uptime is a very important figure that is worth bragging about. If your server does a very limited set of functions day-in and day-out you want to keep you computers up as long as possible.