Dave Jones wrote:
Your complaint seems to be that some bug you hit was fixed upstream,
but not in RHEL, yet at the same time you mention that you never
filed a RHEL bug on this. We'll work on psychic-bug-reporting
for RHEL5, but in the meantime, we need to know when things break
to fix them. Whilst we watch upstream, and backport some fixes,
with upstream committing ~4000 changes per point release, its
not feasible to catch everything. Changes also need to be evaluated
in terms of risk before they go into a RHEL release.
It would have taken me a great deal of time to have filed a useful
bug report. I had no stack trace and I can say little more about it
than has already been said, other than the hardware details of the
machine. The only cheap way that you could (possibly) resolve the
problem for me is to send me a kernel that has more recent patches from
upstream and hope that the problem goes away. (Maybe that's what you do
-- if you do, than it might ~not~ be a waste of time for me to go
through your process.)
On the other hand, my experience is that going straight to upstream
solves problems rapidly and lets me go back to work. Yes, I can be an
'altruist' and spend more of my time helping RH fix a product that costs
$2000 per server, or I can get the job done.
If my quick method didn't resolve my problem then I'd have the
choice of going to LKML with a mainstream kernel (meaning I can have an
e-mail message read by someone who knows how to fix a race condition) or
submitting a bug report to RH (which starts with a password reset for my
redhat.com account, and, if RH is like any other vendor, having to
explain my problem several times to people who don't know how to fix
race conditions.)
I'll consider going back to an RHEL kernel if the machine in question
has problems that I can't fix my way, and then I'll try your process.
We do push out interim updates for really important problems
(typically dataloss/corruption/security issues).
That's great, but it doesn't solve my problem.
Anyway, I know that these problems aren't easy, and they are
things that don't really fit into one box (reliability of RHEL, Fedora
and the Linux kernel) but I've really got a lot of concerns about
reliability and there are days that I envy the guys in the other office
who work with a SPARC/Solaris stack. I've got concerns that bad things
are going to come in the upstream kernel -- for instance, there's a lot
of cleanup and simplification of the network stack in 2.6.13 that will
be nice a year from now, but they'll probably drop something on the
floor, so I'll probably wait until 2.6.13.something to upgrade.
The funny thing is that the world is increasingly believing the
Linux is "ready for the enterprise" in a time that I'm questioning my faith.
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