[WBEL-users] Kernel 2.6

[bill davidsen]

In article <1075821494.2002.25.camel@radar0.larc.nasa.gov>,
Phil Schaffner  <Philip.R.Schaffner@NASA.gov> wrote:
| On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 07:48, Hedemark, Magnus wrote:
| > Terrence Martin [mailto:tmartin@physics.ucsd.edu] asks:
| > 
| > > Has anyone deployed kernel 2.6.x on WBEL?
| > 
| > Specifically?  Not that I'm aware.  But there are some using it on RHEL so
| > it should work.  There is a Red Hat employee who has RPM's on their personal
| > web space if you wish to try it (try googling for it... I don't have it
| > bookmarked).
| > 
| > There isn't a whole lot of incentive, though, as many of the nicer features
| > of 2.6 have been backported by Red Hat into their 2.4 tree.
| 
| Haven't tried 2.6 on WBEL, but have it on FC1.  The yum.conf entry for
| the Red Hat guy is:
| 
| [2.6testkernels]
| name=Test Linux 2.6-test prerelease kernels for RHL9/rawhide
| baseurl=http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.6/

Thank you.
| 
| 
| You will need to check out some of the the other packages in the
| repository, such as modutils and mkinitrd, and upgrade as required as
| well.

I installed a recent modutils, and the Callahan version of the proc
utils (top, etc). There's a Redhat version as well from the people who
forked from the sourceforge tree.
| 
| I wouldn't try this on a machine you need to depend on.  Had some
| trouble getting sound again after the upgrade, 

Known issues, unless you change config you get ALSA, and as I recall it
comes up muted for some reason. I built from kernel.org sources, up
through 2.6.1-bk? will run. I have a problem on WBEL in general that
xmms plays silently and at 2-3x proper speed. Other tools work so I
haven't had a chance to chase that one.

|                                                and have yet to get Cisco
| VPN or VMware to work, although others have reported success there. 

Recent (2.6.2) had some problems with Cisco VPN, but there's an openVPN
which seems to work. Google on the kernel mailing list for details.

| Also got bitten by the lack of built-in reiserfs support - it's in the
| kernel-unsupported-modules package.  I like to have an alternate
| bootable backup copy of the OS installed as well.  Good luck on the
| bleeding edge if you go for it.

You mean R4? Or does the RH version not have Reiser? Again, I use the
kernel.org kernels. I like to have LOTs of bootable kernels, for testing
as well as backup. If I find a bug I can back up and see where it
originated. Did you know LILO will only allow 19 kernels?
| 
| Alternatively, may want to look at the Fedora development stuff:

Pulled down the core over the weekend, haven't had a chance to install
anywhere yet.
| 
| [development]
| name=Fedora Core 2 development
| failovermethod=priority
| baseurl=http://mirror.hiwaay.net/redhat/fedora/linux/core/development
| 	http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/development
| 	http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development
| 
| > There isn't a whole lot of incentive, though, as many of the nicer features
| > of 2.6 have been backported by Red Hat into their 2.4 tree.
| 
| Many, but the "real" 2.6 is still reported to have some substantial
| performance advantages.  Haven't seen (or tried) benchmarks yet.

It scales well, I have seen some indications that in smaller machines
it's measurably slower than 2.4. I'm going to post some results to lkml
late this week, so I won't hash them here.

The built-in IPsec is nice, but I haven't gotten it to work where I need
it instead of the Cisco, and the encrypted mounts I consider vital for
laptops and machines on customer sites. No more patching in crypto loops
and stuff, the code is all in there. No worry about who's reading my
data.

As long as you don't enable IDE taskfile you data are safe, haven't lost
any in over a year. And if you burn audio CDs the ability to use DMA
will really lower the system load.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.