Re: Linux 2.4 future

From: Ed Sweetman
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 08:40:04 EST


Ionut Georgescu wrote:
Because new hardware requires newest kernel, and neither I, nor the
majority of the users out there have the knowledge to 'forward' apply
patches.

Even if 2.4 is phasing out, the process has just begun and it will last
a lot until 2.6 will be ready for production systems.

We are not talking about a fancy, experimental feature. We are talking
about a mature, serious project, that has been traveling for 3 years
along the 2.4 kernel and with even more years of testing and research
behind. I find it just pitty for the linux kernel not to include it.

When going to a conference, you don't present the brand new stuff you
have just computed or measured the night before, because you just can't
know if it is correct or not. Instead, you will present older, but
mature work, that you can swear on. The same with the 2.6 kernel.
Everybody is pushing it in front, but no one is using it for production
systems. XFS and 2.4 are, even together, old, mature work, that anybody
would 'present' anywhere.

Regards,
Ionut


The point was, the patch is perfectly and easily usable the way it is. There stands to be no reason to make it part of the vanilla kernel other than a very slight convenience factor for a small minority of users. Tosatti thinks that that versus changes to this stable kernel that touch common code are unacceptable. Despite the maturity of the project, it just doesn't make sense to include it in the vanilla kernel, it would be a disservice to the rest of the users of 2.4.x kernels that do so for stability, not only in the not crashing sense, but also in the code-base sense. And the number of users who don't use xfs so greatly outnumber the users that do that it's a mute point for Tosatti.
Just suck it up, plug on with the complex command of cat xfs.patch | patch -p1 or move up to 2.6. Anyone using xfs can obviously do either already and everyone not can continue not being affected by new code if they dont want to.

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