Beta 2.5 kernel?

[mcmanus at ducksong.com (Patrick R. McManus)]

[Robert La Ferla: Aug 29 21:18]
> Has anyone tried out the beta 2.5 kernels?  How stable are they?  What 
> does 2.5 offer over 2.4?  Is it worth trying???
> 

2.5 are development kernels - not beta kernels. There is a gigantic
difference. 2.4.20-preX, now that's a beta kernel.

IDE is massively dangerous - read weekly lwn.net for a bit of flavor..

lots of basic stuff is broken; for example floppy support.

there are lots of new toys however.. my personal favs are futexes
(which will allow much more efficient mutex coordination and therefore
reasonable thread scaling), NAPI (the new network driver API that
supports interrupt mitigation and thus NICs that behave much better
under load as well prevention of some SMP induced packet reordering
that is common on 2.4), and the block layer rewrite (which has
significantly improved the performance of an app I have that does lots
of DIRECT disk writes.. things like oracle will benefit greatly.)

ymmv.

-P