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Operating Systems

Journal m50d's Journal: Linux 2.6 is unstable 7

I don't care what other people say. I'm sitting here trying to run a vanilla 2.6.12.5 kernel. It crashed four times last evening and has already crashed once this morning in eight minutes of use. Hard lockup, nothing to do but push the reset button and thank god for reiserfs.

No, it's not just X locking up, I've tried SSHing in to no avail.

No, it's not my hardware, my hardware worked fine under 2.4, heck it's more stable than this when I boot win98 on it.

No, it's not my config. I've configured the minimum possible into the kernel, even leaving off some filesystems that I occasionally use, to try and get rid of this freezing. Also, the same config seems to produce a working kernel with 2.6.11, but no other versions.

No, I'm not trolling. I genuinely want to fix this and I can't.

No, I don't work for microsoft. I'm not trying to discredit linux. I just want a working home system and I can't get it.

I'm sick of everyone either denying that I can possibly be having these problems or insisting they're my fault. They're not. I've done everything right and the damn kernel isn't stable. There are many possible points of blame, but to me the fact that the crash was fixed in 2.6.11 and then a new one introduced in 2.6.12 points to the new 2.6 policy of doing development in the stable tree. I don't know if this is right, but I do know that 2.6 is not a stable kernel and should not be released as such.

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Linux 2.6 is unstable

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  • gid@pimpbot ~ =) $ uptime
    10:40:34 up 63 days, 19:05, 3 users, load average: 0.70, 0.43, 0.32
    gid@pimpbot ~ =) $ uname -a
    Linux pimpbot 2.6.12.2 #1 Wed Jul 13 15:34:12 EDT 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

    And I use this machine quite a bit, it's both a workstation and a server.

    One day my machine started crashing.. out of the blue, all the sudden I couldn't make it through the day without crashing, after using memtest way too much, and trying swapping out ram, I replaced the motherboard, things haven't crashed sinc
    • root@vpn:~# uptime
        22:23:40 up 97 days, 14:40, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
      root@vpn:~# uname -a
      Linux vpn.mydomain.tld 2.6.8-2-686 #1 Thu May 19 17:53:30 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
      root@vpn.mydomain.tld:~# cat /etc/debian_version
      3.1

      first and last time i saw and touched this machine was when i have installed it, 97 days ago
    • Well, good for you.

      It may be a ram problem, or it may be one bad sound/network/video/usb/whatever driver that was changed in 2.6 and now that's causing your lockups.

      The crashing with 2.6.12 after 2.6.11 worked suggests to me that introducing new instabilities is endemic to the 2.6 tree.

      and if 2.4 is still rock solid (try running 2.4 for a week or so, maybe your hardware failed at the same time you installed 2.6), then I'd be relatively sure it's not a hardware problem.

      2.6.11 was rock solid (I ran it for

      • Well if 2.6.11 is rock solid, and there's no new security holes plugged, then why upgrade?

        If you reallly want a rock solid kernel, I suggest you run your distro's sanctioned kernel, as that's more heavily tested. But if you want bleeding edge, install the latest 2.6 kernel.

        While the 2.6 series should generally be fairly stable, no one is making any guarantees. Make no mistake about it, development does go on in the "stable" kernel (especially since the 2.7 tree isn't open yet). Things will break from tim
        • Well if 2.6.11 is rock solid, and there's no new security holes plugged, then why upgrade?

          Improved performance, driver improvements, etc. In this particular case I heard the X mouse framing problem had been fixed. New versions are supposed to be better than the old ones, that's the whole point of their existence. I went back to 2.6.11 after discovering 2.6.12 was unstable, but prior to that I had been continuously upgrading because none of the 2.6.x versions were stable, and my distro had moved on to 2.6.

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