Review: Mandrake Linux 9.2 AMD64 Release (PCBurn) [LWN.net]

This PCBurn author was not impressed with Mandrake's AMD64 release. "The first thing that hit me when I booted the AMD64 Mandrake Linux 9.2 CD was the fact that it uses a 2.4 series kernel. I know some of you are already groaning or rationalizing that the 2.4 kernel would obviously be the most stable and tested kernel series since 2.6.1 has only been recently released and there are still many bugs yet to be fixed. If this was a distribution for x86, I might be inclined to agree with you, but for an AMD64 box this just isn't so. The 2.4 kernel series is being deprecated for AMD64, and as of 2.4.23-pre7 the kernel has devfs support disabled completely for x86-64 due to it causing memory corruption of all things. Nobody is going to fix this problem or any of the others that currently exist in 2.4, so any distribution making use of it must provide their own patches and fixes if they want to continue using this kernel. There certainly won't be any official backports of the drivers and AMD64 fixes currently available in 2.6, such as support for the nForce3 chipset."

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Review: Mandrake Linux 9.2 AMD64 Release (PCBurn)

Posted Jan 31, 2004 7:09 UTC (Sat) by stock (subscriber, #5849) [Link]

i tested Mandrake Linux 9.2RC1 AMD64 Release and it fails miserably running kernel 2.6.0 in 64bit mode : the autoloading of kernel modules doesn't work. furthermore certain packages like dvd+rw-tools fail to run on amd64 when booting kernel 2.6.0 64bit mode, but work flawlessly with kernel 2.4.22 64bit mode.

So still some kernel work is due IMHO.... Calling kernel 2.6.0 the stable release _ONLY_ is valid for 32bit mode i386 platform.

Robert

Review: devfs to be abandoned

Posted Jan 31, 2004 7:14 UTC (Sat) by stock (subscriber, #5849) [Link]

"The 2.4 kernel series is being deprecated for AMD64, and as of
2.4.23-pre7 the kernel has devfs support disabled completely for x86-64
due to it causing memory corruption of all things."

Indeed, Mandrake needs to step away from using devfs and devfsd as they
have done so far very extensively. Furthermore they heavily abuse devfs
by adding their own supermount kernel module. This whole mess should
indeed be abandoned by Mandrake.

Robert