That's actually a good idea [LWN.net]

That's actually a good idea

Posted Jul 28, 2005 9:11 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
In reply to: Regarding debugging bugs in developer Kernels by kune
Parent article: An OLS wrapup

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.

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