Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 28, 2021 14:51 UTC (Sun) by amacater (subscriber, #790)
In reply to: Stable kernel 5.15.5 by alspnost
Parent article: Stable kernel 5.15.5

There's an element of: almost nobody does this, but it would be _really_ helpful if more did. Every successive kernel release supports a bunch more hardware - and fixes more security and other bugs that have been found. Chasing kernel bugs is a thankless task and asymptotic: you have to hope that each release fixes a few more bugs than it introduces. Greg and the other maintainers do this for everyone on minimal feedback, maximal complaints and almost no thanks.

It would be useful if more people followed the stable releases, filed installation reports and bug reports. The distributions tend to pick a kernel release at a point in time and support that from then forward as their stable version. Every distribution has some trade off in this.

To the person stating that the only good kernels are those from Red Hat - yes, they have lots of kernel maintainers on staff but the versions released with Red Hat are invariably older to start with and have to be maintained for a very long time for a subset of hardware - that makes them very much a custom build.

/me wonders how hard it would be to follow stable releases to check how well/badly this works for a while ...

Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 28, 2021 16:38 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> /me wonders how hard it would be to follow stable releases to check how well/badly this works for a while ...

Not that hard ...

Dunno what distro you're on, but if you've got a spare old computer (or even just an old hard drive), intall gentoo. Follow the handbook instructions to install it, especially building the kernel. This is just a learning experience, once you think you know what you're doing, we'll abandon it and do it for real on your regular distro.

Find the git tree for the kernel you want to run, and install it on your main system into /usr/src/linux. Download the source for your disto kernel, and copy their .config into /usr/src/linux.

Use the skills you learnt installing gentoo to compile and install the kernel, build an initramfs, and configure it into grub or UEFI, or whatever your boot setup is.

People are scared of building kernels nowadays. But the old hands did it all the time ...

Cheers,
Wol

Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 28, 2021 16:51 UTC (Sun) by sashal (✭ supporter ✭, #81842) [Link]

Most distros have "upstream" options already: Ubuntu for example has https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ which builds a kernel for each released -stable kernel. Supposedly it has users too :)

Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 28, 2021 22:25 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

If you use Fedora it is pretty simple to build (and patch) Linux from the rpm sources. Then you get it in the bootloader and it is easy to uninstall as well.

Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 28, 2021 23:21 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

On Debian, it's pretty easy. The kernel Makefile has a bindeb-pkg target that builds .debs for you. I have a hacky shell script that downloads and builds me debs from the latest upstream kernel. It's specific to my system, but the guts of it are these commands (edited to remove error-checking, etc) that assume the source is in linux-$VERSION:

CONFIG=`ls -1rt /boot/config* | tail -n 1`
cp $CONFIG linux-$VERSION/.config
make -C linux-$VERSION oldconfig
make -C linux-$VERSION -j`nproc` bindeb-pkg

Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 28, 2021 23:24 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

/me wonders how hard it would be to follow stable releases to check how well/badly this works for a while ...

I did this for a while, but sadly had to revert back to Debian's stable kernel. I have a new computer, and the igb Ethernet driver seems to misbehave on the latest kernels. I reported the bug, but it's a tough one to reproduce and the driver's author doesn't officially support Debian, so this is a difficult issue. :(

Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 29, 2021 17:40 UTC (Mon) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

Random idea re that bug: You can't run RHEL to repro as requested, because it's your daily driver machine (been there). Perhaps you could "survive" passing the card through to a VM running RHEL though? Of course that's only comfortable if you have another way of accessing network, but that's often easy enough.

Stable kernel 5.15.5 - maybe help test, file bugs and say thank you?

Posted Nov 30, 2021 22:37 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Hmm, interesting idea. I have a USB Wifi dongle I can use to access the network if the Ethernet interface is down, so I suppose I could try that. Thanks for the suggestion.