Messages in this thread |  | | From | John Alvord <> | Subject | Re: kernel changes | Date | Sun, 30 Sep 2001 01:17:31 -0700 |
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On Sat, 29 Sep 2001 18:23:15 +0100, arjan@fenrus.demon.nl wrote:
>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. I believe you. I was worrying about the developer transition from 2.4 to 2.5, not the excellent work that the distributors do.
> >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)... As mentioned, I am not worried about the distributions.
> >> 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 Is this criteria explicity accepted by all parties? And is it the only criteria?
> >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.
I read all sorts of reports, many positive and some negative.
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