[Techtalk] Is Linux 2.4.18 Really That Unstable?

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 11:08:31PM -0500, Julie wrote:
> I'm having near-constant crashes from 2.4.18.  I upgraded from 2.4.2-2
> so I could get ext3 support without all the hassle and I'm getting
> tired of the crashes, which don't seem resolved in 2.4.19 either.

What sort of operations cause the crashes? Do you have any special
hardware?

> Does anyone have any suggestions for "ultra-stable" releases beyond
> 2.4.18?  I see that Red Hat 7.3 is shipping with 2.4.8-3 or 2.4.8-10
> (I forget which), but before I upgrade kernels =again= I'd like to
> know that I'm going to some that's going to stay up for a while.

I help manage the setups in a company where we have about 20 developers
and tech staff all using fairly current Red Hat workstations and about
four dozen servers, some of which are under incredibly heavy load (in
some cases handling stock exchange quotes and drawing charts) for long
periods.

It is very rare that we see any crashes at all and almost all have been
due to bad hardware (disks, bad memory, drive controllers going bad).
The only real problem I would attribute to a kernel is using the
standard Red Hat kernels on NFS servers (the 2.4.18-X builds). In short,
these have been very bad -- lots of really long timeouts. Essentially
unusable for us as developers. Using stock 2.4.18 or 2.4.19 kernels
solved this problem.

I realise that this doesn't really address your problem, but I am trying
to say that we are using the kernels you are worried about under varied
loads and not experiencing problems. I would recommend 2.4.18 and 2.4.19
for production use. So that is why I suspect it may be a coupling of
the kernel with your particular hardware and setup and so it may be not
be easy to provide a good answer.

Malcolm

-- 
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.