[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Only yesterday it felt like the 2.6.30 kernel came out (June 9,
2009 – almost a year ago) and we are already up to 2.6.34 (May 17,
2010) with 2.6.35 patches waiting at the gate like an excited
thoroughbred waiting at the post. From 2.6.30 to 2.6.34 there has
been a great deal of kernel development that impacts file systems
and other aspects of Linux storage. Even if you are using a kernel
from a distribution and not ‘rolling your own’ it is important to
understand what has been happening in these kernels and how it can
impact your system(s). The reason is that new versions of popular
distributions are coming out and you need to understand them. What
kernel are they using? Does your distribution have write barriers
turned on by default? Does your distribution allow LVM to support
write barriers? Does you distribution still support the
anticipatory IO scheduler? Inquiring minds want to know but more
importantly, we all need to know.”