Re: [2.4.17/18pre] VM and swap - it's really unusable

Stephan von Krawczynski
2002-01-04T00:20:01Z

> Unfortunately, I lost the response that basically said "2.4 looks
stable
> to me", but let me count the ways in which I agree with Andreas'
> sentiment:
>
> A) VM has major issues

On all boxes I run currently (all 1GB or below RAM), I cannot find
_major_ issues.

> 2) VM falls down on large-memory machines with a
> high inode count (slocate/updatedb, i/dcache)

Must be beyond the GB range.

> 3) Memory allocation failures and OOM triggers
> even though caches remain full.

I have not had one up to now in everyday life with 2.4.17

> 4) Other bugs fixed in -aa and others

Hm, well I would expect Andrea to do tuning and fixing as experience
evolves...

> B) Live- and dead-locks that I'm seeing on all 2.4 production
> machines > 2.4.9, possibly related to A. But how will I
> ever find out?

Me = none up to now I could track down to a kernel issue. The single
one I had was with a distro kernel around 2.4.10 and flaky hardware.

> C) IO-APIC code that requires noapic on any and all SMP
> machines that I've ever run on.

I am currently running 5 Asus CUV4X-D based SMP boxes all with apic
_on_, amongst which are squids, sql servers, workstation type setups
(2 my very own).

> I don't have anything against anyone here -- I think everyone is
doing a
> fine job. It's an issue of acceptance of the problem and focus.
These
> issues are all showstoppers for me, and while I don't represent the
90%
> of the Linux market that is UP desktops, IMHO future work on the
kernel
> will be degraded by basic functionality that continues to cause
> problems.

Have you run _yourself_ into a problem with 2.4.17?
I mean it is not perfect of course, but it is far better than you make
it look.
I could hand the brown bag to all versions below about 2.4.15 pretty
easy, but since 2.4.16 it has really become hard to shoot it down for
me. Ok, I use only pretty selected hardware, but there are reasons I
do, and they are not related to the kernel in first place.

Regards,
Stephan