The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[Adam McKenna]

finger@finger.kernel.org reports the following:

The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is:           2.4.18

But,

The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels is:        2.4.19-pre5-ac3

These seem somewhat contradictory..  Shouldn't the second one report
2.4.18-ac3?

--Adam

-- 
Adam McKenna <adam@flounder.net>   | GPG: 17A4 11F7 5E7E C2E7 08AA
http://flounder.net/publickey.html |      38B0 05D0 8BF7 2C6D 110A

Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[David Ford]

Not at all.

Alan's most recent patch is in line with the 2.4.19 series of patches, 
these are pre patches to the upcoming 2.4.19.

Regardless.  Alan is free to name his patches however he wants.

-d

Adam McKenna wrote:

>finger@finger.kernel.org reports the following:
>
>The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is:           2.4.18
>
>But,
>
>The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels is:        2.4.19-pre5-ac3
>
>These seem somewhat contradictory..  Shouldn't the second one report
>2.4.18-ac3?
>
>--Adam
>

Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[David Lang]

all the -ac kernels need to be treated as -pre

if you watch in detail you can pick ones that are more likly to be stable
then others, but some of them will be intentionally cutting edge.

David Lang

On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Adam McKenna wrote:

> Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 16:37:10 -0700
> From: Adam McKenna <adam-dated-1018827432.0ef497@flounder.net>
> To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels
>
> On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 07:37:03PM -0400, David Ford wrote:
> > Not at all.
> >
> > Alan's most recent patch is in line with the 2.4.19 series of patches,
> > these are pre patches to the upcoming 2.4.19.
>
> Right, but (as far as I know) 2.4.19-pre6 is not considered the "stable linux
> kernel", is it?  So how could 2.4.19-pre5-ac3 be the latest -ac patch to the
> stable linux kernel?  It's more like "the latest -ac patch to the latest
> prepatch for the stable linux kernel".
>
> What I'm really complaining about is that for people who don't like to use
> -pre kernels (like me), finger@finger.kernel.org is useless for finding out
> what the latest -ac patch is to a non-pre kernel.
>
> What would be nice is something like this:
>
> The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels is:        2.4.18-ac3
> The latest -ac pre-patch to the stable Linux kernels is:    2.4.19-pre5-ac3
>
> > Regardless.  Alan is free to name his patches however he wants.
>
> Of course he is.  I don't see what this has to do with anything I've said,
> however.
>
> --Adam
>
> --
> Adam McKenna <adam@flounder.net>   | GPG: 17A4 11F7 5E7E C2E7 08AA
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Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[Mike Fedyk]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:47:47PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
> all the -ac kernels need to be treated as -pre
>

Exactly.

> if you watch in detail you can pick ones that are more likly to be stable
> then others, but some of them will be intentionally cutting edge.
> 

Alan does have a track record of stable kernels, but his tree does have
quite a lot of experimental patches in it.  He does warn about patches that
could be quite bad though (think ide and the recent suspend patches).

In fact, I'm using some -ac kernels in production after it has survived on
my workstation for a while and there haven't been any bug reports for the
stuff I use...

Also, 2.4.18 is the first time that I've seen Alan have -ac patches directly
against 2.4.xx instead of 2.4.xx-pre.  Unless he says otherwise I wouldn't
expect that to happen again.

Mike

Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[Adam McKenna]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:47:47PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
> all the -ac kernels need to be treated as -pre
> 
> if you watch in detail you can pick ones that are more likly to be stable
> then others, but some of them will be intentionally cutting edge.

I was under the impression that the -ac line has a bunch of VM fixes that
haven't been merged into the main tree yet, which should make it better under
high loads than the standard kernel.

Is this no longer the case?

--Adam

-- 
Adam McKenna <adam@flounder.net>   | GPG: 17A4 11F7 5E7E C2E7 08AA
http://flounder.net/publickey.html |      38B0 05D0 8BF7 2C6D 110A

Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[Rik van Riel]

On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Adam McKenna wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:47:47PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
> > all the -ac kernels need to be treated as -pre
> >
> > if you watch in detail you can pick ones that are more likly to be stable
> > then others, but some of them will be intentionally cutting edge.
>
> I was under the impression that the -ac line has a bunch of VM fixes
> that haven't been merged into the main tree yet, which should make it
> better under high loads than the standard kernel.
>
> Is this no longer the case?

It is, except that the changes currently in -ac are more
suitable to be merged into 2.5 first ;)

regards,

Rik
-- 
Will hack the VM for food.

http://www.surriel.com/		http://distro.conectiva.com/

Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[David Ford]

Well, shortly put, the -ac tree is much more -pre than the -pre patches 
are.  Using -ac patches is jumping ahead of the -pre patches normally.

-d

Adam McKenna wrote:

>On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 07:37:03PM -0400, David Ford wrote:
>
>>Not at all.
>>
>>Alan's most recent patch is in line with the 2.4.19 series of patches, 
>>these are pre patches to the upcoming 2.4.19.
>>
>
>Right, but (as far as I know) 2.4.19-pre6 is not considered the "stable linux
>kernel", is it?  So how could 2.4.19-pre5-ac3 be the latest -ac patch to the
>stable linux kernel?  It's more like "the latest -ac patch to the latest
>prepatch for the stable linux kernel".
>
>What I'm really complaining about is that for people who don't like to use 
>-pre kernels (like me), finger@finger.kernel.org is useless for finding out 
>what the latest -ac patch is to a non-pre kernel.
>

Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[Bill Davidsen]

On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, David Ford wrote:

> Well, shortly put, the -ac tree is much more -pre than the -pre patches 
> are.  Using -ac patches is jumping ahead of the -pre patches normally.

  At one point Alan posted "I actually run my kernels" and I think that's
important. In some cases they contain perfectly stable features which are
not in the mainline for... I don't want to say "political reasons," but
reasons of policy rather than technical issues. I have run production on
rmap and O(1) for a while, but they seem destined to stay in 2.5 near
term.

  The -ac has the new ServerRAID driver from IBM. Since I have systems
using the hardware which are timezones away, anything which tends to
stability is good in my use. New firmware means new drivers (often) and
the IBM update CD has a binary module only. I'll try the pre5-ac3 instead.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.

Re: The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels

[Denis Vlasenko]

On 9 April 2002 21:37, Adam McKenna wrote:
> What I'm really complaining about is that for people who don't like to use
> -pre kernels (like me), finger@finger.kernel.org is useless for finding out
> what the latest -ac patch is to a non-pre kernel.

People like you shouldn't use -ac. It is even slightly more experimental than 
-pre. Wait for non-pre or take the risk of -pre[-ac].

> The latest -ac patch to the stable Linux kernels is:        2.4.18-ac3
> The latest -ac pre-patch to the stable Linux kernels is:    2.4.19-pre5-ac3

As I understand it there is only one "latest -ac": the one against latest 
-pre.
--
vda