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Regarding debugging bugs in developer Kernels

Posted Jul 28, 2005 6:15 UTC (Thu) by kune (guest, #172)
Parent article: An OLS wrapup

A few years ago I used to install development kernels on my machines. However a more demanding job and a number of other priorities changed that. I'm still operating three Linux machines using Suse, however I don't have the time to invest into substituting the vendor kernels by the development kernels. The same can be said in user space, except the gcc compiler, which I'm interested in because of my tiny pet project. However the compiler is quite easy to change and there are not a lot of dependencies. One can even have two versions compilers in parallel, without creating a lot of hassle.

It would be nice if vendors would allow me to install the development kernel in a package and get the updates via standard update mechanisms. There will be some additional effort by the vendors, however the support should be easy: users not understanding the concept of a development kernel could always go back to standard. It might even so, that this feature might be available, but it doesn't appear to be widely published.

Don't tell me, that I have to enter simply a dozen commands to do it and that I could script it. Done this, have been there, it's not what I'm proposing here.

I would run those kernels on two of my three machines.

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Regarding debugging bugs in developer Kernels

Posted Jul 28, 2005 7:57 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Actually, I could imagine volunteers packing development kernels into a nice rpm and uploading it to a contribs dir or similar. And keeping them up to date. Then, as you said, more busy people could just run and update the development kernels through the normal SUSE (or other distro) updating mechanisms.

That's actually a good idea

Posted Jul 28, 2005 9:11 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

I've been following the RedHat kernel bugs recently* and I agree that that's a good idea. This is more true for Fedora than for RHEL because RHEL doesn't follow the stock kernel closely. If there is an easy to reproduce kernel bug, users often test both the smp and up kernels. If they tested the stock kernel at the same time that would be good.

Users don't like to test the stock kernel because:
1) It's complicated to compile
2) It takes a long time to compile
3) They got burned by redhat 9 where using a stock kernel broke stuff.

With Fedora the distro kernel is pretty close to the stock kernel so #3 isn't an issue, and a precompiled rpm would fix #1 and #2.

I think the some of the recent CDROM bugs (fixed now) may have been RedHat specific. There have been a few exec shield bugs and those are RedHat specific as well. If users tested a stock kernel right away debugging those would be faster.

Also it would be cool if Fedora did nightly builds of the new kernel the same way that mozilla does nightly builds. I guess I could set that up myself if I had a website and a Fedora system to compile stuff on...

* To read the Redhat kernel bug reports: Create a bugzilla login. Go to your email preferences sellect the "user to watch" as kernel-maint@redhat.com.

SuSE already produceds rpms!

Posted Aug 7, 2005 19:28 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Here:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/people/mantel/kotd
you'll find daily rpms of current kernels,both branches for all distribution versions and current HEAD (e.g. 2.6.13-rc5). Should be really easy to install and even script installing daily.