Re: kernel changes

[John Alvord]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2001, Ville Herva wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 02:32:05PM -0700, you [Pavel Zaitsev] said:
> > I have been watching development of 2.4 since 2.4.2, I wonder wether there
> > would be reversion to old process where kernel source will be solidified
> > before starting development branch.
> 
> I think you can think of each new 2.4.x kernel as a candidate for
> solification. The part of the linux community a like me (and perhaps you?)

One aspect that bothers me is the absence of a success criteria. 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. 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.

Without a success criteria, this process cannot end.

Other examples are recent updates for multi-quad NUMA machines and changes
to handle locking problems on 8-way machines.

john alvord