[Wolves] general kernel question

[Jon Masters]

Peter Oliver wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Apr 2004, Ade Bradshaw wrote:

>>Now that there is so much talk about the 2.6 kernel, how much longer
>>will the 2.4 kernel be supported/updated.

I do not use the new kernel on production systems yet because I had a 
few experiences with the last stable release and am being cautious.

I am not alone in this and I think it will especially be a while before 
very large systems and embedded systems start trusting 2.6.

> People have taken out contracts with companies like Redhat to have their
> systems supported for n years.

Although of course a Redhat kernel is a magical force unto itself.

Redhat shipped a heavily modified 2.4.9 for a long time while various 
bickering and in-fighting was taking place over the mm disaster which 
was 2.4.10 and friends. The 2.4.1x series was the most fun trying to 
deal with as I had a production box falling over when it tried to run 
som very resource intensive processes which actually make use of the 
10GB of swap and 1.5GB of RAM in the machine in question.

Of course I ran memtest and burnk7 and various other diagnostic tools in 
an attempt to identify whether this was a hardware problem but in the 
end had to move said process to another machine which ran a patched 
2.2.20 kernel with various bodges for ext3 and similar stuff.

During 2000 we had especially amusing fun with the 2.3.blah test series 
on an SMP box which might stay up for a day or so at a time.

>>Secondly when do you see the majority of people switching to the 2.6
>>kernel

> When they happen to update their distribution to one that includes the 2.6 
> kernel.

That will happen reasonably quickly from now on however I still expect a 
number of larger enterprise type customers to be considerably reserved.

Jon.