I apologize if this is inappropriate, but I am sure someone will delete it if it is.
I could not get an address for Chris Wright and I wanted to reply to a comment that was reported as his made at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas concerning bug reporting and the kernel.
I have used 2.6.8 through 2.6.14 and probably beyond as I ran the 6.1 release of Kubuntu (I think that is the correct one). I have used mostly Debian distributions and I had problems that to me are kernel related but I do not have the equipment (and probably not the time) to figure it out. Linux always ran good but when I started using the BOINC applications to do mostly protein research (Rosetta project), terrible things happened. I have enough experience testing and developing custom OS code (CPM and several custom Motorola processor based - it dates me doesn't it!) to feel that it is really a kernel problem. I have run NT since version 4, and have had many things happen, but I have never had drives get thrashed as I did in Linux. I posted some comments on forums but the usual response is it is a hardware problem (my hardware works with Windows NT/2000 but not Linux - actually 2 different hardware platforms). I have got more than a little grief on some sites concerning my comments about Linux being flaky. I support Linux and have gotten my wife to move from Windows 2000 to Ubuntu. After having several occasions where after a power failure one or more of my drives were trashed, I moved to Solaris. I am not sure it is any better but I have not found a BOINC version that runs on it and it has been stable. With BOINC running on Windows 2000 I had power failures and a power supply die, but it always came back OK.
Thanks,