Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Bill Davidsen
2005-12-13T19:49:21Z

Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 04:17:53PM +0100, Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
>
>>On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 02:39:31PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
>>
>>>On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 06:00:49PM +0100, Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
>>>
>>>>In the real world, however, admins currently need to pick out specific
>>>>versions of the kernel for specific workloads (try running a large
>>>>fileserver on anything but 2.6.11.11 for example - any earlier or later
>>>>kernel will barf reliably.
>>>
>>>Have you filed a but at bugzilla.kernel.org about this? If not, how do
>>>you expect it to get fixed?
>>
>>I don't expect to get it fixed. It's futile. It can get fixed in one
>>version and broken two days later, and it seems the attitude is that
>>that is just fine.
>
>
> Huh? That is just not true at all. Please give us a bit more credit
> than that.
>
>
>>After a long long back-and-forth, 2.6.11 was fixed to the point where it
>>could reliably serve files (at least on uniprocessor configurations -
>>and in my setup I don't see problems on NUMA either, but as far as I
>>know that's just me being lucky).
>>
>>Right after that, someone thought it was a great idea to pry out the PCI
>>subsystem and shovel in something else. Find, that's great for a
>>development kernel, but for a kernel that's supposed to be stable it's
>>just not something you can realistically do and expect things to work
>>afterwards. And things broke - try mounting 10-20 XFS filesystems
>>simultaneously on 2.6.14. Boom - PCI errors.
>
>
> What PCI errors are you speaking of? We did that PCI work to fix a lot
> of other machines that were having problems. And yes, this did break
> some working machines, and we are very sorry about this. But in the
> future, changes to this area will not cause this to happen due to the
> changes made.

I don't think it's reasonable to get overly upset about *accidental*
breakages. People make mistakes, otherwise you don't get progress.

Note that I haven't changed my mind about deliberately removing features
for which there is no practical alternative.
--
-bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
last possible moment - but no longer" -me