[lug] new distro

David Morris lists at morris-clan.net
Wed Oct 9 16:00:59 MDT 2002


I spent a lot of time (4-6 hours a day for 2 weeks) on getting a 2.4
kernel working on my SS20, SMP kernel with RAID.

In summary, my conclusion:  Don't try it in a production environment.
 Unless something has changed very recently, the 2.4 kernel for Sparc
has no maintainer, so problems are, for the most part, not getting
fixed if they are Sparc specific.

RAID support is just plain dead.  No other way to put it.  2.2 raid
support has ... issues ... and 2.4 raid simply does not work.  The
kernel *will* stick its toung out at you (yes, litterally :) in short
order.

Ignoring RAID, I had continuous problems with the virtual memory
system if I tried using a swap file.  These problems could be
aleviated by using newer versions of mount (I was using Debian Potato
at the time), but the problems only decreased, not dissappeared.  I
think, though, this is an SMP/Sparc issue, rather than a pure Sparc
issue (don't hold me to that!).  It might also be gone as of the most
recent kernel as this was several months ago.

Once you get past the RAID and page file problems, and if you aren't
using any hardware that is *too* weird, the 2.4 kernel is reasonable.
 Do not, however, try to give the system a huge load if you are using
an SMP kernel on a SS20, as I found a high load could somtimes crash
the system.  I would be interested, though, to try my same experiments
using Debian Woody to find out if some old packages were ever at fault
for the SMP problems, or if it is simply the kernel.

--David

-- 
"I might not agree with what you say,
    but I will defend to the death your right to say it!"
  --Voltaire


Quoting "Jason W.Strnad" <jasons at ehlokitty.org>:

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> On Tuesday, October 8, 2002, at 06:51 PM, Ryan Kirkpatrick wrote:
> 
> > For the
> > 2.4 series, I have heard that it works fine on single processor
> 
> > machines,
> > but has a tendency to fall over on multi-processor systems.
> 
> Really?  I have had no problems on my 2way SS20.  Admittedly, the
> 
> machine sees minimal use/load, but I have had fantastic performance
> 
> with the 2.4 kernels.
> - --
> Jason W. Strnad
> jstrnad at mac.com
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