On Sat, 29 Sep 2001 18:23:15 +0100, arjan@fenrus.demon.nl wrote:
>In article <Pine.LNX.4.20.0109290937510.18362-100000@otter.mbay.net> you wrote:
>
>> One aspect that bothers me is the absence of a success criteria.
>
>I disagree here. Red Hat uses "must pass the cerberus test" as one of the
>criteria for kernels. The are other similar criteria, most are obvious (must
>boot :). All other distributions have similar tests and a few even use the
>cerberus testsuite as well.
I believe you. I was worrying about the developer transition from 2.4
to 2.5, not the excellent work that the distributors do.
>
>Maybe your problem is "absence of tests before Linus releases", well
>even that isn't fully true as distros run these tests on -pre kernels as
>well (or -ac kernels, which are mostly in sync with -pre kernels)...
As mentioned, I am not worried about the distributions.
>
>> The current competition for best VM is a good example. The fact is that
>> every operating system will fail with a high enough load. The best you can
>> hope for is a better degradation then the prior release.
>
>There are a few basic creteria here as well, and 2.4.10 fails on some of
>them so far:
>
>1) Must not kill processes as long as there is plenty of swap
> or (possibly dirty) cache memory
>2) Must not deadlock (as that is a code-bug)
>3) Must not livelock without any progress
Is this criteria explicity accepted by all parties? And is it the only
criteria?
>
>Note that no 2.4 kernel so far really achieves 1) in the presence of
>highmem; the obvious deadlocks are just pushed further by tuning.
>
>> At the moment both 2.4.10 and 2.4.9-ac16 are better then 2.2.19. But
>> people keep testing under higher and higher loads and (surprise) they both
>> fail... initiating a search for better degradation logic.
>
>2.4.10 isn't better than 2.2.19 given the criteria above. 2.4.10aa2 might
>be though... and 2.4.9acX+Rik's patches are solid in testing.
I read all sorts of reports, many positive and some negative.
john alvord
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Sep 30 2001 - 21:01:11 EST