Re: 2.1.X and its separation from the Linux User base

Jauder Ho (jauderho@transmeta.com)
Sat, 7 Feb 1998 12:46:51 -0800 (PST)


well maybe I can shed some light here. we use linux extensively at work
and we have a big farm full of linux machines. Since all of these machines are
SMP with 100baseT cards in them, they are able to talk really fast. There is a
lot of NFS traffic going on and we have exposed numerous bugs that only show
when the kernel is REALLY getting pounded on like we are able to. Bill Hawes
has been invaluable in helping us wrt this as have several other people.

I do agree that a feature freeze would be good soon but there is still
a lot of work that needs to be done before I think 2.2. would be out. On the
upside, 2.1.84+hpa's autofs patch has been running pretty rock solid for us for
the last week or so. And here that means it's a good kernel. One thing that I
would like to see fixed is the floppy code. It's ugly and it ain't too stable.
I would take a stab at it but the code is horrendous and I don't need any more
nightmares.

--Jauder

On Sat, 7 Feb 1998, Adam D. Bradley wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Feb 1998, James Mastros wrote:
>
> > Exactly. On the other hand, keep an absolute feature freze, and don't start
> > 2.3 until a real 2.2 is out the door. Changing from a 2.1.x strand to a
> > 2.2.0-preX strand would do that.
> >
> > -=- James Mastros
> >
> > PS -- I don't think that 2.3 should last nearly as long as 2.1 did -- one
> > major improvement, and that's it. IMHO, we could have had a 2.2 by now if
> > sombody hadn't jumped the gun on the SMP IRQ changes <G>. That would have
> > two major re-designs: the dcache and smart-config. Now we are working on
> > getting the bugs out of the third.
>
> Don't forget copy_*_user(), the feature that pretty much kicked off
> 2.1.X, or the gradual changeover to spinlocks, TCP/IP enhancements
> (which were backported to 2.0 in the "SPS" series by Dave Miller that
> became 2.0.30) or the modularization of the sound driver... that's 7
> major changes to the kernel, plus the traditional ploethera of new
> drivers and filesystems and all. And even w/o the IO-APIC stuff,
> dcache is still not completely hammered out (umsdos etc need to catch
> up, and has anyone ever found what caused those random dcache
> corruptions?), spinlocks are making progress, and TCP and sound are a
> little too ragged for a stable release at the moment. So I don't
> think 2.2.0 would _quite_ be out the door just yet...
>
> But I think you're right, the case is _very_ strong for shortening the
> development cycle in the future. But that's Linus's call, and I'm not
> one to second-guess the wisdom of our fearless leader ;-)
>
> Opinions, nothing more,
> Adam
> --
> Things look so bad everywhere Adam D. Bradley artdodge@cs.bu.edu
> In this whole world what is fair Boston University Computer Science
> We walk blind and we try to see Ph.D. student and Linux hacker
> Falling behind in what could be ----> Bring me a Higher Love ----> <><
>
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