Linux Kernel 2.4.10

erinntriggs writes "Kernel 2.4.10 is out and available at the usual places." You know the drill people! Time to make bzImage and wreck those glorious uptimes.

So... how's the VM these days?

[1010011010]

I ask as a swap-laden 2.4.7 user...

The kernel mail list is full of VM stuff

[akc]

You only need to read last weeks kernel mailing list [indiana.edu] to see how much has changed with the VM and why.

Hmmm... swap

[powerlinekid]

So some other people have had problems with 2.4.7 (Redhat 7.2 beta)? How many people out there are actually using 2.4.8,and.9 and if so... do they handle swap better? There should be no reason why a box with 512 megs of ram should be swapping running xmms (i'm not kidding... after being up for about an hour just running X, Gnome and xmms... my computer hits the swap... of course i fixed this (more ram, hasn't swapped yet) but its a little concerning about the aggressivness of the kernel to swap. I'd be appreciative if anyone who has used one of the new kernels could tell us whether swapping is handled a little more gracefully.

Current bandwidth utilization: 96.11 Mbit/s

[bram.be]

That means:
1 kernel every 2-3 seconds
or
5 patches every second
or
96% of the bandwith from kernel.org is used

Desktop users may like the pre-emption patch

[marm]

Those of you who use Linux as a desktop may be interested in the pre-emptible kernel patch for 2.4.10, available from here [tech9.net].

This patch allows the rescheduling of in-flight kernel syscalls if a higher-priority process than the process calling the syscalls becomes eligible to run.

What it means in practice for the typical desktop user is a major enhancement to interactive performance under Linux, especially when under heavy load. Your X pointer will never freeze with this patch. Using this patch, I have played skip-free mp3's whilst my system has had a loadavg of 20, and my KDE desktop was still usable. I could never hope to achieve this with ordinary Linux. It's a really impressive bit of work. Go try it out.

Of course, people with the need for proper real-time response out of Linux (musicians, for example) will love it even more... maximum latencies for me with this patch are under 4ms - again, very impressive.

It's slated for inclusion in the mainline kernel early in 2.5, but could do with lots of testing first... you know what to do.

Re:So what's the downside?

[slamb]

As I understand it, it's not the standard behavior because to take advantage of it, you need to have much finer-grained locking in the kernel. But...they added that anyway in 2.4, for SMP. This guy just took the existing locks and made them work for a new purpose.

Don't want to reboot my machine

[raynet]

I think it is finally time to write a new kernel that supports Linux kernels as module so I could just compile a new Linux kernel and then with modconf just unload the old one and kick in the new one. This is because usually I wait until the machine crashes before doing kernel updates. This is bad due to stability of Linux. Last time my server crashed it had 397 days of uptime (and the crash was a IDE hardware error), now the machine has 347 days and this time I hope to exceed the 400 day limit, but this forces me to use 2.2.14 kernel (until next crash).

UPTIMES!!! WOOHOO!!

[TheFlu]

6:30pm up 365 days, 9:14, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Today marks my one year anniversary of uptime on not one but TWO Linux machines herer. The only reason I powered them down a year ago was to move them into rack mount cases. There's hardly any load on either box, since ones a router and the other a name server, but still...

Looks real good to me!!

[ArtieChoked]

Just downloaded it and built it. I just came off of a 2.4.5 kernel ... was used to an instant free memory drain -- 512Mb used to go to about 40Mb free in no time with X up. WOOHOO ... now showing 328Mb free with full KDE 2.1, xawtv, mozilla, and a few other thingies running - 60 processes in all. I think I'm gonna like this!!

Re:So... how's the VM these days?

[pslam]

He knows what he's talking about. Even with overcommit_memory=0 the behaviour is still somewhat overcommit. "Turning overcommit off" just enables a check that any SINGLE allocation doesn't exceed available memory. This is fine except available memory == paged in memory. Easy example to kill a program:

256MB of RAM in machine...
Allocate 100 * 128MB using mmap. None of these ENOMEM.
Clear 100 * 128MB. Receive rather ungraceful SIGBUS.

First Impressions 2.4.10 from 2.4.8

[hackus]

My System:

Redhat 7.1
X 4.0.2

Hardware IBM ThinkPAD A21p PIII 850/512MB

1) Graphics performance for my M3 ATI processor in my IBM Thinkpad has quite frankly increased a great deal. This is way obvious do to the rapid spinning of my OpenGL plugin for XMMS.

MESA demo's show a 23% speed improvement. Especially tunnels mesa demo frame rate.

VWARE shows a drastic improvement in sound processing ability on my thinkPAD when I use 2.4.10. I am not sure why, 2.4.8 was a good improvement but 2.4.10 is even better.

(Gotta have my ArtBell...)

2) Virtual memory now shrinks its pool considerably when free memory is used up and you start to quit processes.

I loaded Oracle 8.1.7, VMWARE 2.0, Forte' , Bugseeker, and my website up, and MySQL. I was short 170 Megabytes of memory and the virtual swap space handled it very well.

Wasn't slow at all, at least too me. I then logged out and quit all my apps after running some non trivial tests.

I did notice my SWAP shrunk from 170 to 30MB when I logged out and shut everything out.

This is very good, I haven't tested whether or not the kernel will kill a process that takes all memory and is obnoxious about memory, without killing the machine. I would like this feature as normally Linux will just die.3) Startup time was faster by 5 seconds with no changes. I am not sure why, probably do to the memory management fixes.

My use of VMWARE suggests some rather dedicated speed improvments to the basic software.

If you have 2.4.8, you have little reason and everything to gain by upgrading to 2.4.10.

Speed, more effective VM, and graphics are improved noticably.

I highly recommend you upgrade.

-hack

2.4 is stabilizing as proportion of the whole

[hta]

According to the Kernel stats [li.org] of the Linux Counter, the proportion of 2.4 kernels has actually gone slightly DOWN recently - it was briefly above 50%, but is now back to 47.7%.
Two possible reasons:

• More 2.2 persons have registered
  
• The 2.4 persons have forgotten to use "machine-update -c", and have slipped out of the list after not updating for 60 days.
  

The first 4 2.4.10 persons are in there already - but all of them run prereleases.

Go register!

Re:My server mirroring over http and freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran your little perl script in your signature, and your e-mail address was spit out as [e-mail] [mailto]. Is that the correct address?

Thanks and have a nice day.

Re:There may be no downside

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that windows setting is similar to running X reniced with a negative number, so that GUI tasks pre-empt non-GUI ones.

It even tells you to do this for desktop machines in the X manual.

I have found that negative-renicing X provides a sufficent boost to X to make it the GUI as snappy as a windows box.

Need more!?

[TooTechy]

So, the new kernel is out. Great. The last kernel failed to compile on the Alpha. (OK I know 2.2.19 is the last kernel on alphalinux.org)

I have followed (not lead) Linux for the last 10 years with interest,used it extensively, absolutely love it and what it has done for the reliability and enjoyment of personal and now professional computing.

Unfortunately we can all foresee (if not accept) the end of our beloved Linux as the kernel of choice. Even CmdrTaco mentioned it this morning. We have to reboot. Hot swappable kernel, as was mentioned in a previous post is a possibility but I believe this is just bolting on functionality to a now outdated kernel proposition. Linus and the community did a fantastic job of emulating a UNIX kernel. Just what we wanted. We now want more. Linux is not the answer to our future. GNU and the tools around it maybe but not the kernel and I think Linus will be amongst those to accept this.

Maybe HURD is the answer for reliability, extensibility, versatility, Hot Swapability etc. in the future. I will love to follow this trend when it lifts.

To the HURD folk. I watch and wait and long to follow. Thanks.