Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 20:09:27 +0100
From: Cliff Sarginson
Hello all, I was curious as to the stability of the kernel 2.4 beta that comes with the SuSE 7 distro. I was too chicken to install it. Does anybody have it up and running? Is it save to use?
I have been playing around with it in my spare time and it hasnt trashed anything yet :) I have had a couple of problems: I cannot get NFS to work. The 2.2.16 snd- drivers don't work under 2.4 -- but they probably need to be recompiled from somewhere. I havent looked into this too much. There is (yet another) ip filtering mechanism called Iptables, which from what I have read sounds just tickety-boo. However there appears to be no support yet for ipchains under iptables. I imagine there will be in the final release since it appears as an uncheckable option in xconfig. If it aint there an awful lot of systems will break ! The kernel is huge, but that is often the case I think with test kernels. Apart from that it seems to work ok. Be aware of a few things. You need to create a modules subdirectory for 2.4 modules. Depmod will create it's list from all the modules tou have under /lib/modules by default, so it will mix 2.2.16 and 2.4.0 ones up. This may cause a few complaints when you boot up, depending on what you use by way of configuration options. The kernel will expect to find the system map called System.map in /boot (or wherever). It doesnt need the Suse extension in the name. If you have a spare place you could do what I have done which is to create a seperate root file system specifically for 2.4 experimentation, and adjust lilo accordingly to boot the kernel with this root fs. This will give you a high confort factor if you are nervous of creating damage, and it means you can fiddle with anything in /etc and so on inside the test root fs instead of in your production one. If you want more specific information about what I did, re-post or mail me. Cliff