Re: [gentoo-server] WOLK-4.10 patch ?

[Kerin Millar]

> I've had somewhat negative results with WOLK. On a Dell SMP box with
> hardware RAID, it did not work very well at all. (In contrast,
> development-sources has worked perfectly.) On two other Dell single CPU
> boxes, it ran fine for several months and then both machines crashed
> yesterday, so I'm probably going back to vanilla-sources as soon as I
> can.

In terms of the overall quality of the codebase, I think 2.6 eclipses 2.4
and will continue to mature at a sterling rate. 2.6.0 has to have been the
best point "0" release ever. It's going to take a while for peripheral
efforts to migrate to the land of 2.6 though.

With regard to 2.4, aa-sources is now far and away my favourite kernel
patchset and is particularly good for servers, in my view. Obvious
highlights are the very clean O(1) scheduler implementation, reduced
latency, and numerous cleanups for race conditions and SMP scaleability
enhancements. Also, I believe that -aa currently remains the best choice
for systems which very large amounts of memory and/or subjected to high
levels of memory stress (actually, the most outstanding VM patches from
Andrea were integrated mainline in 2.4.23-pre4 - and should have been
considerably longer beforehand - but there are still a few extras in -aa).
I ran it for some time before taking the plunge apropos of 2.6 "testing"
and its performance and stability was exemplary. My faith in this kernel
is also based on seeing just how many "3rd party" patches Andrea had
decided to include in the patchset for so long, so many of which were
recently accepted by Marcelo.

Having said that, if any doubt I think vanilla is now a solid choice, by
which I mean that the overall quality has improved massively as of 2.4.23,
and even more so through 2.4.24 and the latest snapshots. With earlier
versions, I would have felt obliged to hunt around for patches to address
various issues.

--Kerin Francis Millar