Re: when distros do not support official Marcelo kernels they are not being team players (was Re: reiserfs on redhat advanced server?)

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 13:51, Hans Reiser wrote:
> I think it is much more like switching the engine in the car and 
> expecting the car company to honor the warranty on the air conditioner, 
> or expecting that if I install linux on my dell laptop and the hard 
> drive goes bust that the hard drive will be replaced under warranty.

Grin, my analogy was that if you replace the engine you can't complain
about engine problems.  If you replace the kernel you can't complain to
us about kernel problems.  The fact that many different aspects of the
system actually translate into kernel issues makes it hard to fix things
when people start playing musical kernels on us.

> 
> I hope you are not saying that recompiling the kernel is more deserving 
> of voiding a warranty than, say, creating a custom .bashrc file?

A customer recently called us to figure out why their benchmark was
spending all it's time in system time instead of actually doing
something useful.

Eventually I figured out they had switched from our scsi driver to one
directly from the hardware vendor (could just as easily have been from
the vanilla kernel though).  They had done everything right in terms of
compiling it, and the replacement driver probably didn't have any
additional bugs over ours, but it also wasn't highmem io enabled.  So it
spent all it's time doing bounce buffer copies.  

At no point in time during the debugging did I ask them if they had
changed their .bashrc.  

Any reasonable distro is going to try working with their customers as
much as possible.  At the same time, we've put huge amounts of time and
energy into making a coherent, fast and reliable product.  The customer
needs to understand that swapping out bits and pieces of that makes it
significantly harder to support the system as a whole.

-chris