I've had 2.6 based systems deployed in datacenters for over a year now, and it's pretty good for commodity hardware, but people still have to use 2.4 for most of the BigIron type stuff. For instance, EMC only supports PowerPath (their multi-pathing driver) for 2.4 last I checked, and though the newest 2.6 line has EMC CX/AX multipathing support built into DM, it's still experimental and I just can't tell a customer that's spent possibly millions of dollars on hardware and software licenses that we're using new unproven technology. Tons of Oracle things only come for 2.4 (ASMlib for example). That, and, once things are setup, stable, and work, you generally just don't want to change them *ahem* break them. We -just- retired a Oracle database that's been running a 2.4.9 derived kernel for the last two years. Additionally 2.6 performance has varied widely between releases this year, I've found that 2.6.3 was more stable than most of the versions that followed it. All my application servers run a 2.6 derived kernel, but the database nodes will have to be on 2.4 for at least another year if not two--how many people have tested 2.6's memory management performance on systems with 32GB of RAM for instance? Interesting on the OCFS2 support in SLES, our Oracle DBA prefered RHEL because he had read about lots of problems between Oracle and SLES. I forwarded him your email =) And now that I'm sufficiently off-topic, I will be quiet. J. Ryan Earl Systems/Network Engineer dynaConnections Corporation 512.306.9898 -----Original Message----- From: Lars Marowsky-Bree [mailto:lmb@xxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 2:56 PM To: J. Ryan Earl; miele@xxxxxxxxx Cc: jakob; linux-raid; mingo; bueso Subject: Re: Can you help me on Linux SW RAID? On 2005-04-28T14:18:28, "J. Ryan Earl" <ryan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > OCFS2 isn't stable yet, I wouldn't suggest its use for production systems. > Furthermore, where did the requirement for 2.6 (kernel I assume) come from? > Sounds like he was using RHEL3 anyway... That wasn't mentioned in the mail I replied to; anyone deploying a new 2.4 based system right now is a bit behind the times in my opinion, I hope 2.4 goes away soon ;-) OCFS2 is already included in SLES9 SP2 beta; we'll ship it for production use with SLES9 SP2 general availability. Sincerely, Lars Marowsky-Brée <lmb@xxxxxxx> -- High Availability & Clustering SUSE Labs, Research and Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - A Novell Business - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
