Writing at LinuxWorld.com, Joshua Drake contends that while for desktops, the 2.4 version of the kernel is just fine, if you have heavy-duty processing needs, 2.4 has been a series of disappointments. Sysadmins of big iron have two choices, says Drake: go back in time or play upgrade hopscotch. Drake writes . . .

“Let's start from the beginning. In July 2001, I was responsible for upgrading a customer's server from Red Hat 6.2 to Mandrake 8.0. The machine was built from scratch, and Mandrake was installed onto a freshly formatted RAID 5 array. We then migrated the Red Hat 6.2 applications to the new machine.”

“After a little configuration, the machine seemed to run fine. We successfully migrated the entire system in less than five hours. Considering this was a large-scale server, that was quite a feat and was certainly welcomed by our paying customer.”

“However, after about a month into deployment I started noticing strange problems with the machine. Intermittent lockups were the most common. The lockups appeared physical, and the machine was unrecoverable without a reboot.”

“While performing research on the problem, I learned there was a serious sync() bug in the 2.4 kernel. This bug exists in all kernel 2.4 versions until 2.4.6. The solution seemed simple: I upgrade the kernel . . .”

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