New stable kernels.. safe to use?
 

There was an article on slashdot yesterday when the 2.6.0 kernel was released in which I noticed a lot of people pretty much saying that it's not a wise choice to use this new kernel in production environments.

The question I have is... why exactly is this a bad idea? It's already past the beta/test stages if it was deemed worthy to be an official stable release, right?

At what point do most people consider a stable kernel to be actually stable? I guess I can attribute this to the old saying, "If it's not broken, don't fix it," but that seems kind of silly considering that each kernel release is an improvement of some kind to the one before it. However, I have read about some instances where a kernel release actually broke something that worked perfectly fine in the release before (for example, something that worked in 2.4.21 that no longer works properly in 2.4.22 and 2.4.23).

The thing is, I have a few MySQL servers and I read that there were a number of changes in the new kernel that would actually improve the stability and performance of database servers. I was thinking about recompiling the new 2.6.0 kernel and using that, but if it's not stable then I'll stay away from it until, I suppose, it's "really really" stable.

Thanks in advance!

Its stable, they wouldn't have released it if they hadn't been deemed unstable. But you have to realize as well, your thinking of users who used and submitted bugs to the developers, etc. In all cases, not everything is caught and you could always run into problems when using any type of software, etc.

I personally haven't upgraded yet, I see no real reason to on my servers. I am however going to upgrade my desktop to test it out first, see if its worth the upgrade, etc.