Stay away from the latest !

My last kernels introduced a lot of latency and iowait times, slowing down responsiveness of the systems i have here. After some search i discovered not only this is already known, but is also a regression from the old 2.6.18 version of the kernel in which the new Completely Fair Scheduler was introduced. And from 2.6.18 till now, the situation has become even worse. Double worse.

My latest system with 2.6.28 makes my mouse and keyboard skip and freeze if i open a console and type find / > /dev/null. looking at top, i get a lot of iowait time in both my cores and the overall responsiveness of the system is compromised. Can’t even select another window ! Changed configuration, changed some parameters in /proc but the result is the same. Back to 2.6.18 everything perfectly (i can span 100 find / > /dev/null and still use my system for other purposes).

I don’t who is the responsible, the developers that introduced the bugs or the (same) developers that don’t take up the kernel bug and fix it (as noted by other people in the mailing list also).

And stay away from the latest kernel !