[TriLUG] upgrade to 2.4.17!

[Benjamin Reed]

John Franklin [franklin at elfie.org] wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 11:54:21AM -0500, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
> > Its about freaking time.  I was initially kind of skeptical when linus
> > chose to rip out the memory stuff and replace it after release but now I
> > see the wisdom in it.  All of those folks posting performance tests have
> > missed the point.  
> 
> I don't think there is any wisdom to it.  He tried to put new code into
> a release-line kernel and got burned.  It's taken them from 2.4.10
> to 2.4.17 to get things stable again.
> 
> That said, the new memory code is an improvement and 2.4 will benefit
> from it.  But it was still a bad software engineering decision to drop
> it into release code.

More importantly, Rik Van Riel said he had been submitting tons of bufix
patches to the old VM that Linus never picked up.  You can actually still
get his VM with bugfixes and major speed improvements at:

  ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/riel/rmap/

Personally, I find it to be much more trustworthy than the code that AA
threw in.  It was kicking ass in the -ac series, and he's done a lot of
tuning since then.

-- 
Ben Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick (ranger at befunk.com)
http://defiance.dyndns.org/ / http://radio.scenespot.org/
Frankenstein was the creator -- not the monster.  It's a common
misconception, held by all truly stupid people. -- Kryten