[Techtalk] Is Linux 2.4.18 Really That Unstable?

[Dave North]

Julie:
> I'm having near-constant crashes from 2.4.18.
  <snip>
> ...which don't seem resolved in 2.4.19 either.

Let's take this issue first: I've been running 2.4.19 on three different
boxen with very different hardware (one's a vaio laptop, which is weird
weird weird) with no problem whatsoever. It has been very stable indeed,
and capable of multiple-month uptimes (I don't really know how long, since
I reboot the server every now and then for non-kernel-maintenance issues).
	But: I'm using the vanilla kernel.org kernel, and not running
redhat (Debian).
	I did have a trivial problem with 2.4.18, but not crashes.

As to the ext3 issue -- it has been on my radar as a problem for some
months now, but if it were the cause of your crashes, that would be one of
the worst examples I've seen yet.
	It's easy enough to test: run it as ext2 and see what happens.
	Personally, I think ext3 is a mess at this point, and wouldn't run
it. Rather, I run the often-criticized (for reasons that defeat me)
reiserfs with no data loss, no problems, all happiness. I've set it up in
quite a few situations with no problems, including various raid configs.
	Recovery times are astoundingly fast, no fsck, and for the kind of
stuff I do, the file system is faster than ext3.
	Now here's the bad news: redhat fans have to cobble up their own,
since redhat has some religious problem with reiser. Beats me what, but
there you have it.
	However, if you set up the partition as reiser beforehand, redhat
will recognize and install to it. mkreiserfs is trivially easy to use
(basically, mkreiserfs /dev/hdnn and answer "y").


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