Survey: Linux kernel quality

Survey: Linux kernel quality

Posted Jul 10, 2006 16:33 UTC (Mon) by thoffman (subscriber, #3063)
In reply to: Survey: Linux kernel quality by job
Parent article: Survey: Linux kernel quality

The only kernel related problems that have really bothered me in the last couple of years are:

1. Firewire is flaky. Sometimes works, sometimes not. It has been this way since 2.4 or earlier. After reporting bugs a few times I've chosen the "suffer in silence" option and am replacing all my firewire hardware with USB 2.0.

2. On some oddball hardware (Tyan Dual-Slot-1 Pentium-III mb) the PCI IRQ routing is broken for kernels > 2.6.1x or so... didn't get as far as tracking down the details, just enough to know that Fedora Core 5's kernel will boot but can't find any PCI devices, while Fedora Core 4 works perfectly. The machine is a server so I don't care enough to investigate further :-(

3. Incompatibilities between changing APIs for wireless drivers vs. the userspace stuff... the binary "madwifi" driver works great with NetworkManager in FC4 but stopped working in FC5, this is apparantly a known bug which the Fedora team doesn't care about, luckily it works perfectly in Ubuntu, which was one of many reasons I switched distros :-)

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