Some of the vendors have already shifted to 7.1 [LWN.net]

Some of the vendors have already shifted to 7.1

Posted Aug 15, 2006 13:50 UTC (Tue) by mrshiny (guest, #4266)
In reply to: Some of the vendors have already shifted to 7.1 by lamikr
Parent article: X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Fedora isn't "holding back" to 7.0. FC6 will ship 7.1, which, I think, everyone agrees is a good thing. What some people disagree with (myself included) is whether it's good to ship 7.1 to existing FC5 users. I'd say, no, it's not good, because that breaks some users' systems. That's bad software engineering, breaking a working system for no good reason. The users of FC5 who NEED 7.1 already DON'T have a working system, and so they can't say their situation is any worse. And they can always install 7.1 manually.

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Some of the vendors have already shifted to 7.1

Posted Aug 17, 2006 5:15 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link] (2 responses)

It's FC5! Fedora breaks things like Promise FastTrack RAID in the kernel by going to 2.6.17 and doesn't bat an eye!! And since FC5 is the beta for RHEL5, I want 7.1 in FC5!!!

Some of the vendors have already shifted to 7.1

Posted Aug 17, 2006 15:38 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (1 responses)

If Fedora broke Promise FastTrack RAID because of a kernel update, then I consider that a bug. However if the reason that broke is because the Promise card is a binary driver (I don't know the details) then Fedora is in a tight spot because the kernel devs refuse to provide even a stable API, let alone ABI, and there is no "stable" branch of the kernel that is seriously maintained.

The only "excuse" for breaking the driver is if the new driver is supposed to work but happens to have a bug. This is "normal" when software is updated, even if it isn't ideal. (I can't help but mention that THIS use-case can be avoided if drivers are shipped separately from the kernel).

Some of the vendors have already shifted to 7.1

Posted Aug 21, 2006 2:53 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Well the other reason to break fastrak raid support is that it's harmful. Slowing down disk access
while making youself beholden to proprietary firmware is just not a winning combination.

Backstory: promise makes "fake raid" controllers that do a poorer job than the linux builtin software
raid. They are notable for having many more bugs than linux softraid, being marketed
misleadingly, and damaging performance in most use cases.