LinuxWorld.com: The kernel of pain (For large servers, the 2.4 kernel has been a disaster)

“As I reviewed the archives of late December, I found
that the per-user limit support in the 2.4 series kernels is
broken. With the limit support broken, any user — privileged or
not — has the potential to suck up all of the machines resources,
effectively causing an intramural DoS (Denial of Service) attack.
They could do this accidentally, and it would cause a great deal of
grief for any system administrator.

So, what does all of this mean for me? It means that after five
months of battling the new, better-than-fresh-butter,
enterprise-ready 2.4 kernel, I am moving my customer back to the
stodgy, conservative,
more-enterprise-ready-than-2.4-has-been-since-its-release-almost-a-year-ago,
2.2 kernel-based Red Hat 6.2.

The 2.2 kernels may not handle large SMP machines as well, they
may not handle large amounts of memory well (only 2 gigabytes), and
they may have a practical limit of 2 gigabytes on a single file,
but the 2.2. kernels don’t crash or cause phone calls at 5:00 AM.
Moreover, the 2.2 kernels don’t make customers unhappy that they
chose Linux as their server solution.”

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