Does Gentoo support the newest kernel? (eg 2.5.x)

alaterale · Apprentice Joined: 21 Jul 2002 Posts: 223 Location: Podunk

Hiya all,
Just wondering whether its possible to use Gentoo linux with the newest and latest linux kernels. I searched the package listings, and the highest i could find was 2.4.x. I know that's probably the most stable, but I want to try out the newer kernels, as they might be able to finally solve a problem of mine when it comes to gaming in linux. I have an athlon thunderbird processor, and as far as I've heard (and experienced firsthand on many many occasions), theres a bug with those processors when it comes to the cache coherency of the AGP memory from GART (or something along those lines). There was a temporary fix (mem=nopentium), that, at least for me, solves it for about an hour before I get the black screen of death once again (total X server crash). What I've heard though is that the 2.5 series is supposed to finally provide a full fix to this bug, but I'm not really sure whether it will or not (hope so!) Anyway, if anyone knows if you can choose this kernel in the install or whenever, it would be really appreciated

Peace out,
~~The salamander man

sa · Guru Joined: 10 Jun 2002 Posts: 450

try just downloading the 2.5.x code and extract it to /usr/src . That is all a portage ebuild would do! btw, I think the bug your talking about has been fixed with 2.4.19pre1.

sa

n0n · Guru Joined: 13 Jun 2002 Posts: 355

FWIW, I'd stay away from the 2.5.x series for awhile. Up until rather recently there's evidentally been some nasty IDE data corruption bugs floating around, along with other miscellaneous problems. If you do decide to play around with it, I'd also recommend checking out Kernel Traffic on a semi-regular basis to keep up with these things so you don't get burned. :)

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

i has terrible problems with all of the 2.5.x kernels i have tried, id stay away from it for now. wait for 2.6.x

delta407 · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 3:17 am Post subject:

A lot of people have had issues with 2.5.x, but a handful say they work just fine. I would never consider them for a machine that had anything valuable on it, but if you have nothing to lose, why not?

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steblublu

i routinely run many different builds on my test machine. here's some things i've noticed:

2.5.31 being in the development branch has quite a few issues. including ide corruption, usb and framebuffer problems for some chipsets. I haven't personally suffered from these issues as my hardware is not old - and seems to be blessed

2.4.20 (the ac pre's) have issues with any older libraries, gcc etc. alan tests his patches using his own machine (which has the latest libraries loaded on it) so often the error catching code is specific to his (and similar) setups. I have heard of people having piv load balancing issues as well. again, not an issue for me. i always use the latest libraries as well (and gcc 3.2)

2.4.19 was just recently released. It is having a number of issues most notibly with nfs, raid and serial port. Even refusing to compile when some kernel options are configured (try removing the SMP support....).

The nice thing about linux is that it's very easy to compile, patch and test a multitude of kernels on one machine. my grub menu has about 15 entries for different kernels. You can also install UML (user mode linux) which is neat to play around with as well.

.

rac