On 04/06/07, John Anthony Kazos Jr. <jakj@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Been meaning to ask, but is it generally considered stupid to routinely run an -mm kernel for a primary personal machine? I know it's helpful for testing. And it should have a lot more bleeding-edge updates than even the -rc/-git kernels would have. Is it a good idea, or will I be setting my hard drives on "puree" and hoping the blender's not plugged in?
The -mm kernel usually works but, data corruption bugs, mysterious crashes, and other odd behaviour does happen once in a while. To quote some bits from Documentation/applying-patches.txt : " ... The -mm kernels --- These are experimental kernels released by Andrew Morton. [...] This branch is in constant flux and contains many experimental features, a lot of debugging patches not appropriate for mainline etc., and is the most experimental of the branches described in this document. These kernels are not appropriate for use on systems that are supposed to be stable and they are more risky to run than any of the other branches (make sure you have up-to-date backups -- that goes for any experimental kernel but even more so for -mm kernels). These kernels in addition to all the other experimental patches they contain usually also contain any changes in the mainline -git kernels available at the time of release. Testing of -mm kernels is greatly appreciated since the whole point of the tree is to weed out regressions, crashes, data corruption bugs, build breakage (and any other bug in general) before changes are merged into the more stable mainline Linus tree. But testers of -mm should be aware that breakage in this tree is more common than in any other tree. ..." -- Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@xxxxxxxxx> Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
