Just wanted to drop a quick note saying Slicehost has finally released a new kernel that fixes all of the issues I had pointed out in the 2.6.31-302-rs build. It took a whole lot longer than I would have wanted—nearly three months—but it does seem to be working great so maybe one could say it was worth the wait.

The new kernel has a version of 2.6.32.1-rscloud. It includes both the xt_recent kernel module, used for my iptables rate-limiting rules on the SSH port, and also has a much smaller memory footprint with none of the JFS and XFS junk stealing valuable megabytes of RAM. If you are running Arch Linux on your slice, I would highly recommend updating to this kernel.

Edit: Now that 2.6.32.9-rscloud is out, you should probably use that instead.