kernel 2.6.21
 

are there any special changes needed to make this kernel work on slackware 11? last time i tried 2.6.20 there are things that didn't work for me but i dont remember. i currently have 2.6.18.8.

for most system, 2.6.21 works fine (i used 2.6.21.3, custom build). Unless your hardware is kindda unique, you will find that 2.6.21.x is working well.

did u have trouble with the harddrive name change? my machine uses ide hd. from what i have read the new driver will change hda to sda. i am just trying to be cautious as this server is in production and i do not have any devel boxes.

If the HDD is SCSI, yes it will be sda instead of hda.

However, I won't recommend upgrading unless you try it on a devel box first. I know there are problems with upgrading ... say 20 - 30 % chance of problems.

it's strange, I went from slack 11 (2.33.3) to 2.6.21.3 and it seems that now only half my ram is being shown in meminfo and top... any ideas at all? i went from the ide2.33.3 to huge-2.6.21.3 to get support for everything

How much ram do you have ? Did you enable highmem support in the kernel (for anything near 1GB RAM) ?

the system has 1gb, it now reports 512 only, when i did the kernel update i did not make any changes to its default configs it came w/ from the slackware mirror, i used installpkg to install it and then removepkg to remove the old kernel, and then i updated lilo etc and initrd
but i'm going manually configure 2.6.21.4 tomorrow and see about enabling himem support, though it's funny that if that's the problem that somehow it supports 512 but not 1gb...

The same thing happens to all my machines (they all have 1GB RAM), when I don't enable highmem support ... it's probably that.

where is that anyway in the menuconfig?

hm i found it, 4gb or 64gb... lol i'll check 4gb?

So far, i have been using custom kernel and it worked just fine on my laptop
i used the .config from Slackware and i modified it a little bit
- enable ALSA modules
- Change processor type
- Enable High mem
- several other tweaks
everything is working

Try my .config for 2.6.21 in my Box account: http://public.box.net/willysr

thanks for the help and ideas guys, but the provider tested the system ram and found one of the sticks bad, so, it was the hardware, not slackware :P)

Strange ... a bad RAM stick usually causes many more problems than this