Re: Kernel 2.4.3 won't compile
Hi,
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 10:10:28AM +0100, Philip Kendall wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 08:36:25AM +1000, Craig Small wrote:
> > >
> > > I wouldn't go near 2.4.3 on an alpha. I have seen some very very awful
> > > things going on with it. If you can get the ^**(%! to compile it will
> > > probably crash anyway.
> >
> > I'm certainly not having any problems running 2.4.3-ac3 on my
> ^^^^
> > AlphaStation 255 (at least, I'm not having any problems I didn't have
> > running 2.2.x :-) ); what's happened to other people's machines?
>
> ac means Alan Cox patches doesn't it? Totally different story, apparently.
> There appears to be generally a lot more success the ac stream than the
> generic kernel.
as for the stock 2.4.3, there are issues. The mm/numa structure has been changed quite
significantly btw 2.4.2 and 2.4.3. Unfortunately, the changes were adopted for some
archs, but not all - with alpha being one of them. This causes the build errors.
>From close to day 1, there has been a patch around, that addresses this error. It's
called alpha-numa-2 and can be retrieved from ftp.kernel.org in Andrea Arcangeli's
people-subdir. All the 2.4.3-ac3 does, is integrating this patch.
IMHO, the -ac series is problematic at best in various cases and should be considered
with extreme caution. In my experience, all release kernels 2.4.[0,1,2] worked quite
well for me, set aside the well known bugs, like loop-devices etc...
At the present time, I would go with 2.4.2 and the generic kernel series. I did get 2.4.3
to compile OK, but I didn't use it due to the fact, that the alpha-numa-2 patch changed
the mm subsystem in such a substantial way, that i did not want to be a tester for
that on my production-alpha. IMHO, the 2.4.x kernels are not quite ready for prime-time
in all situations. I use them in a very conservative setup and therefore leave out most
of it's advanced and aggressive features ( like Reiser, NFS-v3, devfs and the like ). For
these features, I use an x86 with kernel 2.2.18/19, which is more stable on most of the
advanced features mentioned above.
With the conservative setup, kernel 2.4.2 works *very* well for me, but everybody has
to be warned, that this might not be the case for them, especially, if it comes to alphas.
I just wished, Compaq would get it's act together and form a team, that would carefully
adopt changes to alpha and try to keep the 2.4.x-pre series as current as x86, wrt
fundamental subsystem changes and try to fold those changes back to Linus' pre-tree.
I'm probably not the only one being convinced, that Alpha's future is bound to Linux.
Just my dreams and $.02
Regards,
T. Weyergraf
--
Thomas Weyergraf kirk@colinet.de
My Favorite IA64 Opcode-guess ( see arch/ia64/lib/memset.S )
"br.ret.spnt.few" - got back from getting beer, did not spend a lot.
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