Messages in this thread |  | | From | arjan@fenrus ... | Subject | Re: kernel changes | Date | Sat, 29 Sep 2001 18:23:15 +0100 |
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In article <Pine.LNX.4.20.0109290937510.18362-100000@otter.mbay.net> you wrote:
> One aspect that bothers me is the absence of a success criteria.
I disagree here. Red Hat uses "must pass the cerberus test" as one of the criteria for kernels. The are other similar criteria, most are obvious (must boot :). All other distributions have similar tests and a few even use the cerberus testsuite as well.
Maybe your problem is "absence of tests before Linus releases", well even that isn't fully true as distros run these tests on -pre kernels as well (or -ac kernels, which are mostly in sync with -pre kernels)...
> The current competition for best VM is a good example. The fact is that > every operating system will fail with a high enough load. The best you can > hope for is a better degradation then the prior release.
There are a few basic creteria here as well, and 2.4.10 fails on some of them so far:
1) Must not kill processes as long as there is plenty of swap or (possibly dirty) cache memory 2) Must not deadlock (as that is a code-bug) 3) Must not livelock without any progress
Note that no 2.4 kernel so far really achieves 1) in the presence of highmem; the obvious deadlocks are just pushed further by tuning.
> At the moment both 2.4.10 and 2.4.9-ac16 are better then 2.2.19. But > people keep testing under higher and higher loads and (surprise) they both > fail... initiating a search for better degradation logic.
2.4.10 isn't better than 2.2.19 given the criteria above. 2.4.10aa2 might be though... and 2.4.9acX+Rik's patches are solid in testing.
Greetings, Arjan van de Ven
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