2.2.0pre2 success report

glouis@dynamicro.on.ca
Fri, 1 Jan 1999 20:22:13 -0500 (EST)


FWIW, I have compiled 2.2.0pre2 on a NEC Versa 6200MX notebook and an
elderly dual-Pentium-120 ASUS box today, and both seem to be running well.

The notebook uses a PCMCIA modem/LAN card, so I had to get Dave Hinds's
pcmcia-cs-3.0.6 to compile. Small changes to the Configure script (to
tell it that 2.2.0 is ok and uses the new qlogic source) and to the scsi
client sources (thanks to Steven DuChene; see his note at
http://hyper.stanford.edu/HyperNews/get/pcmcia/beta/53.html
for details) made it all happen.

I've used 2.2.0pre2 to recompile itself, to run a Windoze game via Wine,
obviously to run X; and generally I've tried to beat it up as much as a
single-user notebook ever can be, and up to now I haven't made it
hiccup. On the other hand, a remote NFS connection with
rsize=8192,wsize=8192 truly "sucks rocks," as Alan Cox put it; copying
the 12Mb 2.2.0-pre2 tarball over the Internet, from home to a repository
on a Linux box at work, took at least twice as long as it would have
done with 2.0.37pre4 at both ends; probably longer, but I didn't
actually put a clock on it.

The SMP box has two 3c905 NICs, so I took a chance and substituted the
November 17 version of 3c59x.c for the May 12 version that's in the
2.2.0pre2 tarball, because of the item in Alan's jobs list that says
3c59x can corrupt memory. So far the SMP box's memory seems less
corruptible than mine, anyway ;-) but I haven't really hit it hard yet.
It did do a find on a same-Ethernet-segment nfs-mounted drive, also with
rsize=8192,wsize=8192, looking through some 170000 files, without a
murmur (and decently fast, too, not at all like the copy operation
mentioned in the previous para :)

I have a subjective impression that this kernel gets ordinary things done
a good bit faster than 2.0.37pre4 on these two machines (except for
user-space NFS, that is), but nothing objective to back it up with. If
more carefully-documented testing provides anything useful over the next
coupla days, a further report will follow.

Anyway, so far so good and happy New Year :)

-- 
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|   http://www.dynamicro.on.ca/~glouis  | id glouis@dynamicro.on.ca |
| "Knowing what thou knowest not is, in |  2BC6 4F5A 6657 FF4E 9FBC |
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