They used antique and obsolete kernels

They used antique and obsolete kernels

Posted May 9, 2003 18:09 UTC (Fri) by stock (subscriber, #5849)
Parent article: Windows Server 2003 better than Linux (Inquirer)

The used linux versions i.e. RedHat Advanced Server 2.1 uses kernel 2.4.9-e.3enterprise and RedHat 8.0 uses kernel 2.4.18-14smp. Kernel 2.4.9 is known to have serious problems with Virtual Memory management and shouldn't be used at all today. kernel 2.4.18 may not seem to be that old, but the hardware which is used in the tests are the latest dual P4 Xeon 2.4GHz boards for which those kernels are ancient stuff.

a remedy to get it up to date is install the latest stable kernel 2.4.20 like this :

1. install and compile gcc-2.95.3. Linus Torvalds keeps telling us this, i guess he's not telling us any fairytales.
2. download kernel linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 from ftp.kernel.org
3. apply the ext3 patch for kernel 2.4.20 from: http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/ext3/ and compile your patched 2.4.20 kernel using gcc-2.95.3
4. install e2fsprogs 1.29 of higher.
5. for the 100Mbit and 1000Mbit onboard Intel ethernet cards use e100.0 and e1000.o as the drivers. eepro100.o should not be used for Intel based network cards in those dual P4 Xeon machines. eepro100.o might be ok for a normal 32bit 33 MHz PCI interface, but the machines here have 64bit PCI-X interfaces which run at 66 MHz upto 133 MHz.

After applying those 5 points your brandnew dual P4 Xeon machine will blast like never before. I tested some things here with a Tyan Tiger GC-SL (S2727) board. Installing redhat 7.3 on that will be ok. But that board will only start to perform after running the above fixes.
After that a make -j 4 bzImage is finished within 60 seconds.

Robert

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