[Beowulf] Most stable kernel for mpich2 cluster?

[Eric W. Biederman]

Panagiotis Christopoulos <pxrist at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I build a cluster for Technological Institute of Athens, here, in Greece, with 
> linux of course. My hardware is sixteen HP DL380 with 3.00GHz Xeon(do not 
> laugh, I know that my cluster is too small for those, some of you, design and 
> maintain). I want to install the pure vanilla-sources but I have problem to 
> decide the best version. 2.6.18.1 is out but I think that it' s not a good 
> idea to install the latest kernel, so, I would like to tell me your 
> opinion.
> What would you do?	

Well it depends on why you want to run a kernel from kernel.org.
Why do you want to?  What are you trying to achieve?

In general it makes sense to pick something that should work test it
and if that doesn't work upgraded to the latest version and if that
doesn't work submit bug reports.

If this is an exercise in control of your system and learning I would
start with 2.6.18.1.  In general it will have bugs fixed that are
to intrusive for something like 2.6.16.x  If you don't want to fight
problems and want to delegate the work I would get a support with
someone and do what they recommend.

Low change stability is for people who have something that works and
they want fewest possible changes to fix only those things that have
to be fixed.

When you are dealing with new hardware, you want people to remove
the cruft so they can properly support your hardware.  So you want
a higher rate of changes and testing.

People who want new things to just work with old stable software
should talk to their hardware vendors about not changing the
hardware/software interface.  

Eric