What is the most stable kernel to date?

What is the most stable kernel to date?

[JorgP]

Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
reliable) kernel available?

Thanks
Jorg

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Tomas Szepe]

> Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> reliable) kernel available?

There is no such test because there's no way to describe "being stable"
in formulas.

You might as well like to stick with a kernel that has worked for you
for a long enough time. If you don't need the features of 2.4, go with
2.2-latest.

T.

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Paul Larson]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, JorgP wrote:

> Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> reliable) kernel available?
That's a pretty broad statement to make considering the wide range of
hardware and uses.  Certainly there are many kernels that you could
declare "unstable" (at least wrt certain thing, vm, ide, etc) without too
much argument though.

If you're just looking for a good repository of Linux tests and testing
information, take a look at the Linux Test Project at
http://ltp.sourceforge.net

Thanks,
Paul Larson

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Thunder from the hill]

Hi,

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Tomas Szepe wrote:
> > Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> > reliable) kernel available?
> 
> There is no such test because there's no way to describe "being stable"
> in formulas.
> 
> You might as well like to stick with a kernel that has worked for you
> for a long enough time. If you don't need the features of 2.4, go with
> 2.2-latest.

Well, about stability: I'm running 2.4.19-rc1-aa2 for some days now, I 
didn't yet have any problems. My sparc64, meanwhile, is running 2.5.24-ct1, 
stable for more than a week of uptime yet.

							Regards,
							Thunder
-- 
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Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Tomas Szepe]

> > > Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> > > reliable) kernel available?
> > 
> > There is no such test because there's no way to describe "being stable"
> > in formulas.
> > 
> > You might as well like to stick with a kernel that has worked for you
> > for a long enough time. If you don't need the features of 2.4, go with
> > 2.2-latest.
> 
> Well, about stability: I'm running 2.4.19-rc1-aa2 for some days now, I 
> didn't yet have any problems. My sparc64, meanwhile, is running 2.5.24-ct1, 
> stable for more than a week of uptime yet.

As for me,

$ arch
i686
$ uname -r
2.4.19-pre10-ac2
$ uptime
  6:51pm  up 36 days, 19:14, 19 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
(config: p2, 2 ide controllers, raid0, 2 network adapters)
--
$ arch 
sparc
$ uname -r
2.4.19-pre10
$ uptime
  6:51pm  up 38 days,  8:46,  7 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
(config: smp ss10, scsi, raid0, 1 network adapter)

The latter is with my dynamic-nocache patch included.


T.

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Steven Cole]

On Fri, 2002-07-12 at 10:54, Tomas Szepe wrote:
> > > > Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> > > > reliable) kernel available?
> > > 
> > > There is no such test because there's no way to describe "being stable"
> > > in formulas.
> > > 
> > > You might as well like to stick with a kernel that has worked for you
> > > for a long enough time. If you don't need the features of 2.4, go with
> > > 2.2-latest.
> > 
> > Well, about stability: I'm running 2.4.19-rc1-aa2 for some days now, I 
> > didn't yet have any problems. My sparc64, meanwhile, is running 2.5.24-ct1, 
> > stable for more than a week of uptime yet.
> 
> As for me,
> 
> $ arch
> i686
> $ uname -r
> 2.4.19-pre10-ac2
> $ uptime
>   6:51pm  up 36 days, 19:14, 19 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
> (config: p2, 2 ide controllers, raid0, 2 network adapters)
> --

Even with an early 2.4.x kernel, you can get good results.  I guess it
really depends on your load.

[steven@trenda steven]$ uptime
 11:29am  up 205 days, 23:29,  2 users,  load average: 0.35, 0.14, 0.08
[steven@trenda steven]$ uname -a
Linux trenda.esa.lanl.gov 2.4.1 #1 Tue Jan 30 08:03:20 MST 2001 i586
unknown

This is on an elderly Pentium-90 which ran kernel 0.99 for over a year
once upon a time.

Steven

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[jbradford]

I'm looking at a 285 day uptime on 2.2.14 - depends what you're doing with the machine, really.

> Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> reliable) kernel available?

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Juergen Sawinski]

My computer at work uses 2.4.19-pre10-ac2-preempt (i686) and is up 13
days now. A couple of people are working on it causing high loads with
Matlab, VMware etc...

The last one, 2.4.19-pre?-ac?-preempt (sorry, forgot the numbers) ran
for a couple of month... so I consider 2.4.19-pres quite stable.


On Fri, 2002-07-12 at 18:48, Thunder from the hill wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Tomas Szepe wrote:
> > > Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> > > reliable) kernel available?
> > 
> > There is no such test because there's no way to describe "being stable"
> > in formulas.
> > 
> > You might as well like to stick with a kernel that has worked for you
> > for a long enough time. If you don't need the features of 2.4, go with
> > 2.2-latest.
> 
> Well, about stability: I'm running 2.4.19-rc1-aa2 for some days now, I 
> didn't yet have any problems. My sparc64, meanwhile, is running 2.5.24-ct1, 
> stable for more than a week of uptime yet.
> 
> 							Regards,
> 							Thunder
> -- 
> (Use http://www.ebb.org/ungeek if you can't decode)
> ------BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK------
> Version: 3.12
> GCS/E/G/S/AT d- s++:-- a? C++$ ULAVHI++++$ P++$ L++++(+++++)$ E W-$
> N--- o?  K? w-- O- M V$ PS+ PE- Y- PGP+ t+ 5+ X+ R- !tv b++ DI? !D G
> e++++ h* r--- y- 
> ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
> 
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-- 
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Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research
Dept. of Biomedical Optics
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Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Richard B. Johnson]

On 12 Jul 2002, Juergen Sawinski wrote:

> My computer at work uses 2.4.19-pre10-ac2-preempt (i686) and is up 13
> days now. A couple of people are working on it causing high loads with
> Matlab, VMware etc...
> 
> The last one, 2.4.19-pre?-ac?-preempt (sorry, forgot the numbers) ran
> for a couple of month... so I consider 2.4.19-pres quite stable.
> 

2.4.18 doesn't have any 'crashing' bugs in normal use. One of my
servers has been running this for 210 days. It does a lot of network-
interface stuff (samba, etc.) plus nightly back-ups so it's used
a lot.


Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.18 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).

                 Windows-2000/Professional isn't.

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Kelsey Hudson]

On 12 Jul 2002, Steven Cole wrote:

> Even with an early 2.4.x kernel, you can get good results.  I guess it
> really depends on your load.

indeed -- i had a box colocated in an ISP's basement running 2.4.2 on an 
abit bp6, twin 366MHz celerons, that stayed up for nearly 300 days. I 
think the grand total was 284 days or something ridiculous like that; 
impressive for both such an old release of the kernel and inherently 
broken hardware. the isp has since gone out of business due to financial 
problems, and that's the only reason the machine went down, otherwise i'm 
certain it would still be up now.

i still maintain that the latest kernel should be the one in use unless 
it's noted as a keep away kernel *ahem*2.4.11*ahem* -- the newest has got 
all the latest bug fixes, vm changes, features, etc. however, as always 
with varying hardware configurations, your mileage may vary

 Kelsey Hudson                                       khudson@compendium.us
 Software Engineer/UNIX Systems Administrator
 Compendium Technologies, Inc                               (619) 725-0771
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Adrian Bunk]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Richard B. Johnson wrote:

> 2.4.18 doesn't have any 'crashing' bugs in normal use. One of my
>...

Perhaps in your "normal use"...

If you mount SMB shares Oopses appear quite frequently.

> Cheers,
> Dick Johnson

cu
Adrian

-- 

You only think this is a free country. Like the US the UK spends a lot of
time explaining its a free country because its a police state.
								Alan Cox

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Urban Widmark]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Adrian Bunk wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> 
> > 2.4.18 doesn't have any 'crashing' bugs in normal use. One of my
> >...
> 
> Perhaps in your "normal use"...
> 
> If you mount SMB shares Oopses appear quite frequently.

2.4.18 oopses if the share has characters that are not in your nls table.
Patched and fixed for 2.4.19 (unless you are talking about some other oops?)

/Urban

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Adrian Bunk]

On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, Urban Widmark wrote:

> > Perhaps in your "normal use"...
> >
> > If you mount SMB shares Oopses appear quite frequently.
>
> 2.4.18 oopses if the share has characters that are not in your nls table.
> Patched and fixed for 2.4.19 (unless you are talking about some other oops?)

The Oopses I saw on my machine were fixed by
00-smbfs-2.4.18-codepage.patch. I saw an Oops by someone else that wasn't
fixed by this patch but it seems it was fixed by something else in
2.4.19-pre.

> /Urban

cu
Adrian

-- 

You only think this is a free country. Like the US the UK spends a lot of
time explaining its a free country because its a police state.
								Alan Cox

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[Bill Davidsen]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, JorgP wrote:

> Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
> reliable) kernel available?

If you run SMP and high load, you want to go with a recent -ac kernel.
Stable is load dependent, and to some degree hardware dependent as well.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.

Re: What is the most stable kernel to date?

[J Sloan]

Bill Davidsen wrote:

>On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, JorgP wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Has anyone conducted any tests to determine what is the most stable (as in
>>reliable) kernel available?
>>    
>>
>
>If you run SMP and high load, you want to go with a recent -ac kernel.
>Stable is load dependent, and to some degree hardware dependent as well.
>  
>
I have solved a good many problems on
production servers by running -aa kernels
as well -

Joe