Re: [Sheflug] Linux 2.4.8y

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

> On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 12:29:54PM +0100, Chris J/#6 wrote:
> > Well I'm grabbing it now and choking rather violently over the filezise ... 
> > it's a wopping 26MB...
> 
> Yeah ;) Mine was 21Mb IIRC - are you getting gz over bz2?

Aye ... grabbed the gz ... cable modems help you not care to the same 
extent when it comes to downloading files :)

> 
> > look?") which is still running a 2.0 kernel ... and the source tree for a 
> > 2.0 is 6MB.
> 
> Be interesting to see where all the stuff has been added - new filesystems,
> new drivers, new network stacks, etc. etc. 

"Everywhere" I think :) VM's been writeen who knows how many times, 
networking in 2.4 was re-written, the SMP code's gone through leaps and 
bounds, you've all the extra support for hardware that didn't exist 4 years 
ago...there's all the frame-buffer stuff that 2.0 didn't have. I suppose 
doing a du -sk in the drivers/ directory would show the largest increases :)

> 
> I still think 2.4 is slower than 2.2 though, at least on this machine. I
> might have to nab a 2.2 from somewhere just to prove it at some point, but
> it certainly feels slower (that said, 2.4.8 is a lot quicker than 2.4.0, so
> perhaps I've not given 8 a sufficient chance to prove itself yet!).
> 

Well, I'll only tell over time. I've got the kernel built and running now, 
and I haven't seen any noticable speed improvement yet. I think the SMP is 
meant to be better in 2.4 compared to 2.2 (from what I remember hearing), 
so see if it affects performance on this box.

> I also still don't think 2.4 is particularly stable yet - it seems okay, but
> the compile felt really wobbly for some reason :(

Seemed okay here ... though at the speed it builds there isn't really 
chance to see any wobbly messages at the rate it scrolls up screen (and I 
couldn't be asked to scroll back :)

Last time I looked at 2.4 was about 2.4.2, and I wasn't overly happy with 
the iptables state-tracking, as I was getting incoming data from 
connections that had been closed, and they were being rejected as not being 
part of a valid connection ... as if iptables said "right that's it - 
connection's closed" and didn't wait for ACK's or whatever from the remote 
end to confirm closure. This however is a non-issue for me today as I've an 
OpenBSD box acting as a dedicated firewall now.

2.4 also has extra support for AGP and video cards, which should allow 
XFree86 4.1+ to gain performance boosts. Again, summat I'll only be able to 
tell with time.

Now I'm back on Slack as well, so there's less crud in the way of a running system, I think it'll be harder to push this machine to the limits (short of doing 4 concurrent kernel builds :)

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \  "If not for me then, do it for yourself. If not
 \ cej [at] nccnet.co.uk        \  for then do it for the world." -- Stevie Nicks
  \ www.nccnet.co.uk/~cej/  ~-----------------------------------------+
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