my experiences with 2.3.22 (not too good :)

Ben Castricum (benc@gns.getronics.nl)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 21:42:18 +0200

I got the idea of trying the latest 2.3 kernel to see what the future will
bring us ;) I compiled it on my 486DX2, reconfigured lilo and rebooted it.
After I discovered that the video mode selection doesn't recognise the in
lilo configured mode anymore (but strange enough, after a scan command it
found the mode) I decided that it might be wise to keep my monitor on this
computer instead of the one it usually is on.
First weird thing I noticed from the kernel was a bunch of mod-requests for
some ide-probe module which failed because the root fs wasn't mounted yet..
(made sens to me, although I got the picture after one error. repeating it 8
times seemed to me like a bit overkill).
Second was after the root fs was mounted i got lot's of errors reported by
modprobe, stating that it couldn't open /lib/modules/2.3.22/modules.dep.
That made sens to me as well, since the depmod -a command is part of one of
the start up scripts. Unfortunately modprobe just kept on telling me this
(actually it looked like modprobe was called lots and lots of times) and
_very_ slowly, I could see the scripts being executed. But when it came to
rc2.d the messages repeated at a slower pace and not much later messages
from VM appeared telling me that it was killing processes.. After waiting
another 30 minutes or so I rebooted with the old kernel and run the
depmod -a 2.3.22 command believing Linux would never make it to the login
prompt without the modules.dep.
This sure did the trick and booting was okay! I removed my monitor and was
connecting it to my other PC when I heard a familiar beep coming from the
pc. I put the monitor back and discovered the machine was rebooting. Weird
thing was that my other PC had rebooted as well so this may have been
related to some power loss (due to loose cables or whatever).
What really did it to me was when i finally logged in with telnet onto my
machine, gave it a dmesg command the machine rebooted immediately after the
output of dmesg was completed.
This was about the 6th time my hd was fscked due to the uncleanly mounting.
I reconfigured lilo to use the old 2.2.12 kernel again and decided to try
again after 2.3.30 or so.

Note that I did some reading before messing around with 2.3. I installed the
new modutils and even the netfilter stuff but since I couldn't get the
machine running any logner than let's say a minute or 5 I never got around
to test it. I still think that 2.3 looks very neat and has some cool
features. I am sure to try it again, but a long while later ;)

I can supply additional info if anyone is interested.

Ben

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