RE: My thoughts on the "new development model"

Massimo Cetra
2004-10-27T06:56:52Z

> On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 08:04:33AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > Oh yes I remember... I was very interested because of netfilter and
> > ramfs but couldn't use it because of its awful stability. That was
> > when I started complaining about linux development model, where new
> > features were more important than bug fixes, which resulted in no
> > usable kernel before 2.4.18.
>
> 2.6.x has taken a rather different path from 2.4.x

However, results are similar.

2.6 seems to work better than 2.4 in "early stage of stable branch" but
It's quite impossible to set up a production server on 2.6.x, optimize
it and keeping the same performance with 2.6.(x+2).

Iosched has a lot of flavours, with performance worse than 2.4 (at least
for databases).
Swap is a misterious thing and It needs a degree in swappiness to
understand how it works and how it changes.

I see a lot of efforts in making a top-performance kernel but these
efforts are not compatible with a stable-tree.

Stable means not only that the kernel does not hangs, but that features
remains (almost) the same for a reasonable amount of time.

Max