Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 21:45:08 +0100
From: Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
To: Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>
Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>, Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>,
       "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@suse.de>,
       penberg@cs.helsinki.fi, bunk@stusta.de, rml@novell.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, johnstul@us.ibm.com
Subject: Re: 2.6.16-rc4: known regressions
Message-ID: <20060222204508.GO8852@suse.de>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0602211631310.30245@g5.osdl.org> <Pine.LNX.4.64.0602211700580.30245@g5.osdl.org> <20060222112158.GB26268@thunk.org> <20060222154820.GJ16648@ca-server1.us.oracle.com> <20060222162533.GA30316@thunk.org> <20060222173354.GJ14447@boogie.lpds.sztaki.hu> <20060222185923.GL16648@ca-server1.us.oracle.com> <20060222191832.GA14638@suse.de> <1140636588.2979.66.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> <20060222194024.GA15703@suse.de>
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On Wed, Feb 22 2006, Greg KH wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 08:29:48PM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 11:18 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > > What about trying a stock 2.6.6 or so kernel?  Does that work
> > > differently from 2.6.15?
> > 
> > ... however it's very much designed only for the kernel that comes with
> > it (with "it's" I mean all the userspace infrastructure); all the
> > changes and additions since 2.6.9 aren't incorporated so you probably
> > really want new alsa, new initscripts, new mkinitrd, new
> > module-init-tools. some because of abi changes since 2.6.9, others
> > because the kernel grew capabilities that are really needed for "nice"
> > behavior.
> 
> I totally agree.  Distros are changing into two different groups these
> days:
> 	- everything tied together and intregrated nicely for a specific
> 	  kernel version, userspace tool versions, etc.
> 	- flexible and works with multiple kernel versions, different
> 	  userspace tools, etc.
> 
> Distros in the first category are the "enterprise" releases (RHEL, SLES,
> etc.), as well as some consumer oriented distros (SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora
> possibly.)
> 
> More flexible distros that handle different kernel versions are Gentoo,
> Debian, and probably Fedora.
> 
> And this is a natural progression as people try to provide a more
> complete "solution" for users.
> 
> When people to complain that they can't run a "kernel-of-the-day" on
> their "enterprise" distro, they are not realizing that that distro was
> just not developed to support that kind of thing at all.

I have to disagree somewhat violently to that statement, I'm afraid :-)
At least for me, it's pretty much a requirement that I can put eg
2.6.18-rc2 on an enterprise install. It's a must to debug problems -
both ways, actually, testing both a new rc kernel on that enterprise
distro but also putting a vanilla kernel on the enterprise distro to
test something that fails with the distro kernel.

I'd absolutely hate if we got into a situation where you couldn't just
put a new vanilla kernel on SLESx. Calling it a complete solution to
just sounds like an excuse for breaking things that we don't have to.
Please lets not make things so fragile!

> So, in short, if you are going to do kernel development, pick a distro
> that handles different kernel versions.  Likewise, if you are doing
> userspace development (X.org, HAL, KDE, Gnome, etc.) you pick a distro
> that allows you to change that level of the stack.

Everything doesn't fit into those two boxes.

-- 
Jens Axboe

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