Re: New Linux Development Model

From: caszonyi
Date: Wed Nov 09 2005 - 09:03:08 EST


On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, jerome lacoste wrote:

On 11/9/05, caszonyi@xxxxxxxxxx <caszonyi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]

There are other reasons for using a new kernel. One of them is
interactivity. In the days of 2.4 one could achieve decent interactivity
for the desktop using preempt and low latency patches. For 2.6
interactivity was a real issue (possibly because of the new development
model).

I don't get it. You say that with 2.4 + patches you had good
interactivity and with 2.6 you don't? Why did you switch then?


Because i like to test new kernels. On 2.4 I run the vanila kernel and a test kernel. When something went wrong on a test kernel was always a stable kernel to use.
2.6 looks a lot like 2.5. New features are added very quickly without much testing. Of course there is Andrew's -mm tree but this one sometimes is too broken.
For me linux looks now like it has one unstable tree (2.6) which is something like -ac was in days of 2.4 and -mm was in the days of 2.4 -2.5 and -mm which looks like it became very unstable.
This is what i saw ok lkml (maybe my view is distorted).
I'll stop ranting and try both of them because i have some bugs to report.

And why should dirstribution makers always backport new security fixes ?

Because they want to ensure maximum stability. That's what users are
(sometimes) paying for.


Maximum stability of what ? If the distribution kernels are based on
vanila kernel (i.e. are based on unstable kernel) how stable will they be
?

Maximum stability of the kernel they deliver. When you fix a
vulnerability, you fix a vulnerability. You don't just happen to add a
new bunch of features, and a new bunch of bugs. Otherwise you are
going to piss off your users a lot.


That's what's happening on 2.6. Every 2.6.x release is different.
The 2.6.x.y kernels sometimes are almost no different from 2.6.x


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