On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 09:54:18AM +1000, Steve Downing wrote: > <stepping into the bear pit here.. > > > Whats the go with kernel's these days? I usually just wait for a > recent one to appear one one of the magazine cd's and then just use > that. > But these days I hear things like the -ac tree is more stable, VM > is crap in later (or is it earlier?) 2.4.x kernels, and other wierd > things. > > Considering that I run pretty typical desktop hardware (USB, IDE, > SB Vibra 128, and TNT2 video, VIA chipsets), should I be investigating > the -ac tree, or even avoiding certain versions of Linus's tree, > or are there others even? Whats the goss people?
I can't really comment too much on the differences between 2.4.10+ and the -ac kernel series, but I can say that VM in the recent -ac's and 2.4.10+ are craploads better than the earlier versions for your average workstation machine. I just wouldn't let 2.4.10 go anywhere near a production server given that there are still problems to work out. I'm only mentioning 2.4.10 instead of 2.4.12 since I haven't tried that yet; 2.4.10 works pretty well for me. I do have a -ac patched kernel but haven't bothered to boot that up yet :). The VM problem you mention started at 2.4.5, when Linux started swapping things out to disk like mad for some reason, and unless you actually bothered to follow the "swap size = 2 x ram size" rule (haha), performance went to the absolute pits. If you're running a typical desktop machine, I'd _highly_ recommend getting the kernel pre-emption patches at http://www.tech9.net/rml/linux/ (or http://kpreempt.sourceforge.net/ if you're running an earlier 2.4.x kernel). Your system will be miles more responsive without any sacrifice in speed. -- #ozone/algorithm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
