Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 26 Nov 2001 13:26:49 +0100 (CET) | From | willy tarreau <> | Subject | Re: [RFC] 2.5/2.6/2.7 transition [was Re: Linux 2.4.16-pre1] |
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> The _real_ solution is to make fewer fundamental changes > between stable kernels, and that's a real solution that I > expect to become more and more realistic as the kernel > stabilizes. I already expect 2.5 to have a _lot_ less > fundamental changes than the 2.3.x tree ever had - the > SMP scaliability efforts and page-cachification between > 2.2.x and 2.4.x is really quite a big change.
Well, I know this has been discussed several times, but why not having 2 stable trees : one for the average "joe" user which would include fixes and new features, and one for prod servers which will have only bugfixes, and quite old, tested features, with less risks of regression. I think that all in all, current 2.4 kernels are fairly stable except, perhaps for a few, not so common, features. There are still lots of people who don't upgrade their 2.2 to 2.4 (or even old 2.4 to newer 2.4) because of a "well known bug" in a feature they might even never use.
I'm myself used to build kernels from Alan's tree, on which I add several features (ipsec...), and backport bugfixes from more recent kernels (as far as my understanding can go, of course). When 2.4.14 went out, I was still using a 2.4.10ac12 +many fixes, but without any feature upgrade. I have several friends using my kernels because they find them more stable although I couldn't judge because they don't always report bugs as people do on LKML.
A very conservative branch could be maintained with not much effort since we would only have to include new fixes (ok, sometimes you can't keep up and have to make the step, that's why I jumped from 2.4.10ac to 2.4.13ac). We could even count failure and success reports for some features to help those paranoïd to decide which kernel to use.
Perhaps it's what distro makers do, but at least they don't announce their kernels on LKML as you, Alan, or Andrea actually do.
I even may participate in this, given my very limited time (ie, if people are ready to wait 3 weeks without news, and accept sometimes completely broken kernels when I jump from one major release to one other), but honnestly, that's not my primary goal.
Just my 2 euro-cents here, Willy
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