Re: Suggestions for kernel/XFS version? Release?

[Kelly Corbin <kcorbin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I know you guys get asked this alot, but what's your best guesstimate of 
your next full release?  I'm not having any problems with my current XFS 
installations, so I'm wondering if I should just wait a little while 
longer to upgrade from 2.4.16 (XFS 1.1) to 2.4.19 (next XFS release), or 
go ahead an do it now (XFS from CVS) because a release is not in the 
near future.

Thanks!

Kelly

Steve Lord wrote:
> Just a simple answer, those 'snapshots' that you see are probably a lot
> more stable than 1.1 or 1.0 were. Most of what has gone into xfs since
> 1.1 has been bug fixes and code cleanup. In general I run the cvs tree,
> plus other changes I am working on on my workstation. Unless I messed
> up somewhere in those extra changes, I have zero problems. We run
> nightly regression tests internally, and it is only rarely that
> they show anything up.
>
> Steve
>
> On Wed, 2002-10-02 at 10:40, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
>
> > I've been using XFS for a while, but find myself in a bit of a quandry
> > about where to go now...
> >
> > A week or two ago, my main server got very flaky (semi-constant
> > rebooting), so I replaced the Athlon UP MB/CPU for a nice
> > Athlon MP version.  It came up fine with the kernel at the time
> > (2.4.9-31SGI_XFS_1.1, no data loss or errors), so I upgraded to
> > smp-2.4.18-4SGI_XFS_1.1 to get a recent MP-based kernel.
> >
> > The server has a 3ware RAID controller, and also uses LVM, so I've been
> > paying attention to versions of these drivers.  2.4.18 and previous
> > had old versions of the 3ware driver, so I would compile a new version
> > whenever I changed kernels.
> >
> > This is when I noticed that the UP XFS 2.4.18-4 (could have been
> > XFS 2.4.18 instead) kernel had LVM 1.0.3, whereas SMP XFS 2.4.18-4
> > has 1.0.1-rc4.  I also found that SMP XFS 2.4.18-4 seemed to hit the
> > disk a lot for writes, almost like it had no or only a very small
> > kernel-level write cache/XFS pre-allocation space. (write cache is off
> > on the controller)
> >
> > Since the performance was noticably bad because of this, I switched last
> > night to SMP 2.4.18-SGI_XFS_1.1.  This seems to have solved my performance
> > problem, but I now I have 2 new problems.  1) I'm left with LVM 1.0.1-rc4,
> > and 2) I can't compile a new 3w-xxxx driver (the module compiles, but I get
> > "Undefined symbols" when I run the depmod to verify installation).
> >
> > So the quandry is: Where should I go from here?  So far,
> > 2.4.18-SGI_XFS_1.1 seems to have solved the performance issue I was
> > seeing, but has old LVM and 3w-xxxxx drivers which I'd like to upgrade.
> > It looks like 2.4.19 has LVM 1.0.3 and the correct 3w-xxxx driver version
> > already.  So I could compile up my own kernel, but the only XFS patch I
> > see for 2.4.19 is a CVS snapshot from last week.  I'm leary of using a
> > snapshot for an integral part of the kernel, but there doesn't seem to
> > be a 1.1 patch for 2.4.19 (and the 2.4.18 patch seems to be XFS 1.1-PR2).
> >
> > Any thoughts?  Thanks. :)
> >
> > --
> > Randomly Generated Tagline:
> > "Now it's time for pay back ... Can someone lend me enough for a Coke?"
> >                      - Chris Bentley

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