dear people,
i think there's some great confusion here about the usa of the term 'stable'. ariel (at least as far as i know) runs systems that bear a rather heavy load over network connections. most people run machines that do not bear that heavy load. thus, your definition of 'stable' is quite different. and its a rather known fact, that for realy heavy network, memory and processing load on linux, most of the 2.4 kernel series was rather flowed, at least until 2.4.18 came out. a company i worked with encountered lots of woes in this area (running a machine with redhat's kernel or any vanilla 2.4.X kernel, about 8-12 month ago) year back, perhaps 8 month back) in the lab and bombing it with traffic while running their application on it (which used a lot of memory), caused networking to stop working after several hours or half a day, in a repeatable manner. only when then eventually installed a variant of the 2.4 kernel with the 'aa' patches - did they manage to have a machine running steadily - and that certainly wasn't a tested kernel, back then, not to mention QA. you can argue that your experience was different as much as you will - but the fact was that the VM code caused problems on a machine that was hammered heavily the same problem existed with pre 2.4.10 kernels, that is 2.4.7, 2.4.9, etc). and as far as i know, not all of arcanageli's patches went into 2.4.19 (muli - please correct me if i'm wrong regarding this merge). this VM fiasco apparently did not have a parelel during the 2.2 kernel release cycle, or with earlier versions - it did happen with 2.4 . btw, at the same time, another company that used much earlier 2.4 kernels with an appliction that performs network processing - did not encounter _any_ problem. ofcoruse, they handled traffic flowing at only 10 mega-bit per second - and that did not use as much memory. and they were using very early 2.4 kernels (including some 2.4-test kernels) - and had no problems. so from their point of view, 2.4 was stable since quite long ago. so, i'd say again - stability depends on what you're doing with the system. and QA alone cannot fix problems stemming from major bugs in the underlying system. -- guy "For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
