Is anyone else having kernel problems?

[Iain Stevenson]

.. I remember starting this thread and I'm still having kernel problems. 
I'm starting to feel like a veteran kernel compiler and it's no fun.

The difficulties I have had with the 2.4.18 and 2.4.19 kernels have been:

- failures to compile certain drivers
- failures to boot
- file system corruption (EXT3) with some of the 2.4.19-pre series

Kernels that have built have performed very strangely indeed and failed in 
non-repeatable ways but with a partially common failure scenario ie:

- boot kernel, everything OK generally for up to a week
- a program (mrtg), a daemon (cron) or the filesystem starts to do really 
funny things
- the system crashes in the early hours of the following morning
- there are no log messages giving clues to the problem.

Rebooting seems to restart the cycle.  I built the latest Ben kernel 
yesterday and that booted, I'm hoping it keeps going ...  My system is on 
an "Old World" Mac with the root partition on IDE disks running as a RAID1 
array.

This has started to dent my confidence in Linux - it seems to me that the 
2.4 series has had just a tad too much experimental stuff cobbled into it.

  Iain



--On Sunday, May 5, 2002 6:58 pm +0200 Graham Leggett <minfrin@sharp.fm> 
wrote:

> "Stephen J. Sanders" wrote:
>
>>  I tried 2.4.19-pre7-ben0 and had to give up on it.  I didn't have
>> the problem of being dumped into the debugger, but I started to see
>> some VERY strange behaviors in using automake and libtool--for longer
>> programs I kept getting messages about bad libtool archives and other
>> errors that suggested that an internal system buffer might be getting
>> overwritten, although this latter is speculation on my part.Switching
>> back to the default YDL 2.2 kernel fixed the problems.
>
> The key word here is "pre", which means "prerelease", which in turn
> means "probably won't work, use at own risk".
>
> If you're running a production system, use a production kernel.
>
> [from previous post]
>> >>> I've been having real problems with kernels lately - so much so that
>> >>> I yhink it needs to be flagged for users.  Specifically, for late
>> >>> 2.4.17 thru 2.4.19 kernels:
>> >>>
>> >>> - a number of the 2.4.19pre kernels fail to build
>> >>> - several, including benh versions have been unstable
>> >>> - a couple failed to boot (dropping into the debugger at cron or
>> >>> swapper tasks)
>> >>> - one created a filesystem error
>> >>> - another started spewing garbage out of the imap socket after a week
>> >>>
>> >>> This is BAD and can only make people very wary of Linux in general.
>> >>> Does anyone know the status of work to iron these problems out?  My
>> >>> system is a 9600 with PowerLogix processor upgrade booting from SCSI
>> >>> but running Linux
>
> This is not bad at all.
>
> Take note of the label "prerelease" on the kernel version, and choose
> your kernel accordingly.
>
> Regards,
> Graham
> --
> -----------------------------------------
> minfrin@sharp.fm		"There's a moon
> 					over Bourbon Street
> 						tonight..."