tlug: Kernel 2.2.0-pre8

[Neil Booth <NeilB@example.com>]

Has anyone tried out some of the most recent development kernels?

I thought I'd compile the latest and give it a whirl. I'm impressed by a
quite noticeable speedup in normal use.

Firstly, the boot sequence seems to scroll past faster (not particularly
meaningful, I know). More noticeable was Emacs takes less than half the
time to load that it does under 2.0.36, I would estimate about 2 seconds
compared to 4-5 (128 Megs). For me, second and subsequent loads under
2.0.36 take about 2 seconds, on 2.2.0-pre8 they are literally
instantaneous. X + WindowMaker loads faster too. Directory traversal in
File Runner is faster.

I think most of the above can be explained by 2 things:- a) the
directory caching that didn't exist under 2.0.x, and b) improved
read-ahead from the disks.

I'm having a few growing pains keeping 2.0.x bootable at the same time
as this stuff on a new machine, having upgraded one or two of the
programs I was told to. In particular, having installed an updated
modutils, procps and procinfo, some of my older 2.0.x kernels refuse to
boot complaining about corrupt filesystems (though other kernels boot
without complaint), and others complain about stuff like iso9660 file
systems not being in the kernel, though I know they are. I think this is
all module-loading problems, despite the modutils docs claiming to be
backwardly compatible with 2.0.x.

Oddly, I've found that rebuilding one of the old kernels made it
bootable again. Weird. I'll try the rest now.

The strangest thing is that under 2.2.0-pre8, Windowmaker 0.20.2 seems
to occupy 100% of CPU in half-second spurts every 2-3 seconds, making
for average CPU usage of around 25%. It takes up negligible CPU under
2.0.x, so I'm going to install the latest 0.50.2 stuff to see if that
helps.

Anyone else got any experiences to share?

Neil.
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