kopsis
Group: Members
Posts: 65
Joined: July 2005 |
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Posted: Aug. 13 2005,12:09 |
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Many of the people that want it don't have any idea why other than it's new and shiny ;) For those that do have a legitimate reason, it's probably one of the following:
Performance -- the 2.6 kernel features many improvements in process scheduling (deciding which bits of competing code get to run when). This can improve performance (or at least perceived performance) by keeping apps like media players and the desktop from being slowed down by "background" processing. Note that what you're really doing is just favoring the stuff the user "sees" and slowing down background tasks (vs. a 2.4 kernel) but that's generally desirable from the user's standpoint. 2.6 also reduces overhead for things like spawning new processes and a number of interprocess communication mechanisms which makes it highly desirable for servers.
Drivers -- some device subsystems saw significant improvements in 2.6 and though some of those have been backported to 2.4, some have not. Hotplug/coldplug is much improved in 2.6. In addition, drivers for new hardware are starting to be written exclusively for 2.6. Some get backported to 2.4, but there are no guarantees.
SMP -- symmetric multi-processing is much improved in 2.6. There are far fewer spots in the kernel where interrupts on both CPUs are disabled or resource locks taken by one CPU hold up operation on the other(s). That means better SMP performance (and also better "realtime" performance on single-cpu systems).
The tradeoff of course is size -- both in terms of "on-disk" and "in-RAM" memory usage. The benefits are real, but are of far more value to newer high-end systems than old hardware. The other issue is that though 2.6 gets extensive testing on newer systems, it doesn't see anywhere near the same level of use on old hardware. The result being that 2.4 is less likely to have problems when running on an old "untested" system than 2.6. So long as DSL continues to cater to older low-resource systems, staying with 2.4 seems like the best solution.
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