Branching "stable" 2.3.99pre8 kernel

Hi,

As some people have probably heard me say in person, the current head branch of the kernel CVS tree is a substantial step backwards in speed and now stability from 2.3.99pre8, and is not really usable for me to do any user-space work on.

My 2.3.99pre8 tree (see below) crashes *repeatably* and *deterministically* (with the exception of NFS which is basically crap anyway), and therefore I'm fixing them as I find them. In contrast, what we've got at the head of our CVS crashes *randomly* on my A180 and will not stay up long enough to run the configure script of any of the programs I have successfully built natively on 2.3.99pre8.

I don't know whether this is because 2.4.0test5 is broken upstream, or whether we screwed up the merge, but it is simply unusable for my purposes.

Therefore, until it gets fixed, I am using a hacked-up combination of the pre-merge 2.3.99pre8 and updated signal and trap handling code. I would like to tag this as a branch in CVS so that I can continue to fix kernel bugs that affect me without having to fully update to 2.4.0.

Will people mind terribly if I do this? It should be trivial to merge changes from the branch as needed.

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David Huggins-Daines wrote:
...

David,

I don't mind...I just don't want the fixes you make there get lost. Please either post the fixes to the list or sign-up a maintainer (like myself) to merge fixes into the 2.4.0-test6 based branch ("mainline"). I'd be happy to merge the few parts I understand/have clue about for you.

thanks,
grant

The branch tag is STABLE_2_3_99PRE8. I've put one "fix" (really just a workaround for some total stupidity that is hopefully a bit less stupid) in there already, but I don't know if it's worth merging since with any luck our userland memory management will be fixed for real soon.

[email protected], http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.