I have been using the 2.4.20 kernel with the CK set of patches with my gentoo install for a while, and they were ok, but every once and a while I’d come to the computer in the morning and find it sitting at a login screen, and I assumed tthat it was something futzing up during the night which caused an X-Windows crash. I decided to go back to the plain old “Vanilla” kernel and see how that went. I found that it was fine, no overnight crashes and things worked just tickety-boo.
However the low latency patches were awsome. With the vanilla kernel things just ground to a halt when doing any sort of heavy compiling in the background, and trying to work with that was just pissing me right off. I just went back to the ck-sources kernel and it’s great, compiling going in the background and not a stutter with work. Guess the O(1) scheduling really does work for improving desktop responsivness! I didn’t remember the vanilla kernel being that bad, but I guess I’ve been using the Gentoo sources package (which includes low latency patches) for longer than I thought.
I also moved to the latest X, 4.3.0, which was finally marked stable in Gentoo last night. Seems to work so far. Will have to see how it reacts with Quake or Tuxracer. Works fine in Quake and Tuxracer.