Re: starting with 2.7

[Posted January 12, 2005 by corbet]

From:		William Lee Irwin III <wli-AT-holomorphy.com>
To:		Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo.tosatti-AT-cyclades.com>
Subject:		Re: starting with 2.7
Date:		Thu, 6 Jan 2005 08:59:08 -0800
Cc:		Theodore Ts'o <tytso-AT-mit.edu>, Adrian Bunk <bunk-AT-stusta.de>, Diego Calleja <diegocg-AT-teleline.es>, Willy Tarreau <willy-AT-w.ods.org>, davidsen-AT-tmr.com, aebr-AT-win.tue.nl, solt2-AT-dns.toxicfilms.tv, linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 07:45:19AM -0200, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> You got to be kidding now?
> 99% of the features distributions have applied to their 2.4 based kernels 
> are "enterprise" features such as direct IO, AIO, etc.
> Really I can't recall any "attempt to make 2.4 stable" from the distros,
> its mostly "attempt to backport nice v2.6 feature".
> Do you have any example?
[tytso's comments elided]
> It took sometime to happen, but instability related to "high memory
> pressure" has been fixed in almost all cases long ago (the only
> remaining issue to my knowledged is loopback device with highmemory).
> I hardly see complaints of "crashes under load" problems since
> v2.4.19/20 or so.

I am unfortunately holding 2.4.x' earlier history against it. While you
were maintaining it, much of what we're discussing was resolved.
Unfortunately, the stabilization you're talking about was essentially
too late; distros had long-since wildly diverged, they had frozen on
older releases, and the damage to Linux' reputation was already done.
I'm also unaware of major commercial distros (e.g. Red Hat, SuSE) using
2.4.x more recent than 2.4.21 as a baseline, and it's also notable that
one of the largest segments of the commercial userbase I see is using a
distro kernel based on 2.4.9.

-- wli