Hi,

I am testing it now with your two extra patches.
I started vmware but I don't notice it now. Everything is snappy.
The system is a RH9 with upgrades. The latest errata kernel still
stops for seconds sometimes and vmware (and rsync between two drives
for that matter) makes a noticable performance impact. With .70-mm2,
I can still work on other things and not wait for other things to
finish first.

However there are problems: Basically, the autoload fails.
My eth0/eth1 (both use 8139too) are down.
The iptables modules do not load so the iptables service is failing.
When I modprobe the needed modules, the things start working.
E.g. named can be started after I modprobe capabilities. I brought up
named for example because the kernel logs messages for this one:

process `rndc' is using obsolete setsockopt SO_BSDCOMPAT
process `named' is using obsolete setsockopt SO_BSDCOMPAT

The modutils I use is from the latest rawhide (contains module-init-tools).

And an interesting issue: rpm -q fails for root, works for users.

# LANG=C rpm -q modutils
rpmdb: unable to join the environment
error: db4 error(11) from dbenv->open: Resource temporarily unavailable
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Resource temporarily
unavailable (11)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
package modutils is not installed
$ rpm -q modutils
modutils-2.4.25-2

What should I try to enable module autoload? Find my .config attached.

Also, I have an old parallel port ZIP drive, and ppa.c does not compile:

drivers/scsi/ppa.c: In function `ppa_proc_info':
drivers/scsi/ppa.c:280: invalid operands to binary ==
make[2]: *** [drivers/scsi/ppa.o] Error 1

The line compares a struct ppa_struct* with a struct Scsi_Host *.

Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi