Problems with recent kernels

Problems with recent kernels

[Justin R. Smith]

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?
-- 

Re: Problems with recent kernels

[Alan Cox]

> 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.

What disk controller are you using ?