Your Mileage May Vary.
I have two machines sitting side by side on my desk. One is a P133 web
server which ran 2.2.0-pre6 basically from a few minutes after it was
released until last Tuesday with no hitches whatsoever; in fact, for the
previous ten months it has been running various 2.1.xxx releases with
only two minor problems that were both tied to specific kernel revisions
and fixed in before I had a chance to report the problems. The other is a
PII-300 desktop multimedia machine which has been wildly unstable (rarely
more than 18 hours between crashes) on all of the 2.1.x and 2.2.x kernels.
The latter machine is now setting an uptime record for the 2.2.x series at
3 days, 20:58 on kernel 2.2.2.
The kernel configuration in both cases is identical; I compiled on one
machine and copied the binaries to the other. If I'm getting results
this different on hardware that has many months if not years of history
running Linux reliably, then I would expect to see even greater differences
with less mainstream hardware. And I do.
I still haven't managed to compile a 2.2.x kernel for an Alpha (although
I make few attempts at that and they are far between), so I don't know
how well that works yet.
Later 2.2.x kernels will of course work for more and more people, but
the early 2.2.x kernels are really only a week or two different from
the late 2.1.x kernels. "Normal" users who rely on hard stability
should wait until a real Linux vendor sorts out the bugs and shrink-wraps
the kernel into a nice well-tested package for them. Everyone else will
be busily banging on the 2.2.x until then.
-- Zygo Blaxell, Linux Engineer, Corel Corporation, zygob@corel.ca (work), zblaxell@furryterror.org (play). It's my opinion, I tell you! Mine! All MINE! Linux naga 2.0.36 #1 Dec 29 13:11 EST 1998 up 8 days, 5:23 Linux hysterical 2.0.35 #1 Aug 9 17:26 EDT 1998 i486 up 10 days, 9:58- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/