Re: BUG in 2.6.29 final: broken network connection

Re: BUG in 2.6.29 final: broken network connection

[Ingo Molnar]

* sinter <sinter.salt@gmx.de> wrote:

> Am Dienstag 24 März 2009 18:25:03 schrieben Sie:
> > > It cost me almost 1 complete day
> >
> > Wouldn't it have been simpler to wait when you found a problem and read
> > Ingo's email on the subject from a few hours ago ?
> 
> Wouldn't it be simpler to restrictively avoid crap code in final 
> kernel versions? And if that does not work by appeal shouldn't the 
> netdev maintainer simply be substituted?
> 
> Who needs a maintainer adding his SOB with closed eyes under 
> untested crap code? Who needs someone like that for kernel 
> development?

Nonsense. 303c6a0 "gro: Fix legacy path napi_complete crash" was an 
obvious looking bug fix for a real crash that was reported, against 
a commit that went upstream in 2.6.29-rc1.

It was a fix for a serious regression and i'd have applied it too, 
and would have pushed it to Linus.

Furthermore, even on affected systems it took certain configs and 
certain conditions for the bug to trigger under high load. So there 
was no real good way to find this bug quickly.

Such kind of bugs can happen anytime, to any maintainer. Unless we 
100% freeze the kernel for a full month before release, this risk 
simply cannot be avoided. It is far more problematic if maintainers 
dont push known fixes or ignore fixes. The networking tree is 
exemplary in picking up fixes addressing bug reports quickly. A 
proposed fix was posted 33 minutes after i sent my bugreport.

Things breaking is simply the nature of software changes - get used 
to it. When new software with 1 million lines of changes over the 
previous version comes out, dont jump on it immediately, if your 
peace of mind depends on a 100% working system. Only try it if you 
want to help out developing it.

And there's an easy solution for you in any case: you can wait for 
.29.1 which i'm sure will be out quickly.

Thanks,

	Ingo

Re: BUG in 2.6.29 final: broken network connection

[Ingo Molnar]

* sinter <sinter.salt@gmx.de> wrote:

> > And there's an easy solution for you in any case: you can wait 
> > for .29.1 which i'm sure will be out quickly.
> 
> And what top-class advice would you give me if I would have found 
> that serious bug in .29.8 or in .29.9? Due to your answer every 
> shit is possible and nothing is impossible, or did I get something 
> wrong?

You got it exactly right.

This world is ruled by probabilities, and generally everything is 
possible - even a bug slipping into a .0 release that you could 
trigger personally, even though -rc1 through -rc8 worked just fine 
for you.

Such things happened before, and they can happen again. Yes, it can 
hit you - and it did hit me too and i'm not complaining.

We still try our best to reduce the probabilities. We cannot, 
however, unfortunately, bring them down to zero. The fix looked 
reasonable and the justification of it fixing a live crash looked 
reasonable too.

What we can do, and what we did do, was to provide people (you 
included) with a fix within 12 hours after the code having been 
released.

That's the deal really.

	Ingo