Re: tux on 2.4.27 kernel and referrer checking

On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 10:14:05AM -0500, William Lovaton scribbled:
> Very interesting discussion...  A question for all of you: How do you
> define "stable"?  How do you measure it?  Have you seen crashes with 2.6
That's an interesting question indeed. As a developer, I measure 'stable'
with the number of fixes and changes (of any kind, not only bugfixes)
applied to the branch of a software product labelled as 'stable'. That's one
side of the coin, the flip side is the "real life" stability, i.e. in
production, there...

> kernels?  Are they reproducible?
...what's important is the number of security vulnerabilities (often being
result of 'unstable' code in the sense described above) and glitches that
cause the machine to misbehave in production. I've seen a few 2.6 crashes
(mostly on desktop), freezes (desktop and fileserver) and spontaneous
reboots/freezes (on a moderately busy webserver). The desktop crashes/oopses
very often have to do with preemption, as for the rest, I'm not sure - the
BIO (which is still stabilizing IIRC) seems likely to be the problem since
the freezes occur under I/O load. As for 2.4, it has serious problems with
the VM under stress (heavy webserver load with php/sql activity) to the
point when an OOM kills not only the process(es) but also the machine. As
for your are they reproducible question. It's another interesting issue -
for me, personally, the reproducible bugs/glitches are the better ones since
they are easier to spot and fix. If a software product suffers from
non-reproducible, random crashes which are definitely related (preemption,
VM for instance) but don't follow a pattern that's easy to reproduce, then
there is something in state of flux inside the product and it's not
production quality. I don't really want to name names here, but if you look
at the sources of the kernel shipped by one major company, you will be
amazed that it ships with 2.5MB of bzipped diffs and 1.6MB of vendor
additions. This is not what I consider 'stable'. I might be wrong, of
course.

> 
> I'm using Fedora Core 2 (with official updates) in a high loaded, high
> traffic production server and it is very, very stable.  Right now it has
> 25 days of uptime.  It could be more by now, but some reboots have
> prevented it.
Can you define high load? We've had machines that were over 150 days of
uptime under heavy load, only to crash suddenly under the same load. They
are running 2.4 and can, indeed, be considered stable.

> The only problem I have is TUX (not using it right now) and that's why
> I'm subscribed to this list.  Anyway TUX is not present in the official
> kernel anymore.
What is the problem with TUX?

regards,

marek

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