RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 3, 2009 10:34 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: RHEL 5.4 released by jgg
Parent article: RHEL 5.4 released

2.6.30 runs circles around the RH kernel on certain benchmarks, the RH kernel is no longer a good representation of Linux.

Well, I saw sometime ago (probably here) a link to benchmarks comparing subsequent Fedora versions. Some benchmarks had better values on later version, some had worse. Generally there were less benchmarks with worse values, still, it was far from evident that a newer version performs better.

Anyway, in the real world people usually run applications, not benchmarks and they really don't care what is a "good representation of Linux". It doesn't really help if some benchmarks runs 5% faster if e.g. the ClearCase kernel module doesn't load anymore and the developers can't access the source code of the project they are working on... I use SLED at work and I really don't want a new kernel version, because I don't trust neither the kernel developers nor the NVidia developers that my two-monitor setup will work with a newer version. I really don't care about a 10% performance improvement in the kernel, because 99.99% of the time my CPU does nothing.