Problems with recent kernels

["Justin R. Smith" <jsmith@mcs.drexel.edu>]

Please respond to me personally since I am not subscribed to this list.

Is there a problem with some of the recent kernels? (2.4.12-2.4.14)

I am running Redhat 7.1 on two systems:

1. a Pentium II system using the ext2 file systems on all partitions.

2. a Pentium III system using the ext2 file system.

 When I switched to kernel version 2.4.12 on both machines, I
encountered problems:

1. the Pentium II machine had major file system errors on boot after
clean shutdowns (major =  fsck must be run in manual mode). After a few
reboots, the system was unusable. I reinstalled the operating system and
upgraded the kernel to 2.4.9 and it has run perfectly since.

2. the Pentium III system had different problems (under kernel 2.4.12):
many applications crashed with error messages 

     xmalloc cannot allocate 10 bytes

although the system has 300 meg of RAM and a gig of swap.

When I moved to the 2.4.14 kernel on the Pentium II machine, I got a
file system error after a clean shutdown, but it wasn't as severe as the
problems I had earlier: the damaged file system passed the fsck test.
Again, retreating to 2.4.9 solved the problems.

Any suggestions?
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