Long-term support and backport risk [LWN.net]

Long-term support and backport risk

Posted Jun 20, 2007 23:34 UTC (Wed) by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
Parent article: Long-term support and backport risk

Basically all the cons are boil down to "It's a lot of work" and "driver disks are hard."

At my old job, I used to create tons of driver disks. Not because the drivers were propietary but just to fix bugs and add support for newer cards. It's not so bad if you script it.

The 2.6 build system makes it easier as well.

But both RedHat and SuSE driver disk support is pretty crappy. The error messages are not useful. Debugging them is hard. It's not very well tested so out of 5 Fedora releases I supported, I think that driver disk support was completely broken in 2 (FC2 and FC5).

Also driver disk the documentation sucks.

BTW. It's interesting to look at the aacraid driver packaging. They recompile the driver for over 100 kernels (guess) and stuff it all into 1 big rpm. :P

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Long-term support and backport risk

Posted Jun 21, 2007 4:28 UTC (Thu) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]

the driver disk model breaks down once you have to update the libata core to have the latest sata work, or to update drm to have the latest graphics work. If it were just drivers, it's one thing. but in general it spans wider the longer the time lag is.

Long-term support and backport risk

Posted Jun 21, 2007 8:22 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

Sometimes you do have to patch the kernel core, but most hardware support can be dealt with through driver disks.

As far as I could see, RHEL3 had pretty recent libata. The last RHEL3 driver disk I created was for the 3ware 9550 which was pretty new at the time. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I patched the libata module in one driver disk so that's a possible option.

It is a problem dealing with kernel upgrades after the install, that's true.

I'm generally happy with RHEL.