LWN: Comments on "Stable kernel 3.13.11"

Stable kernel 3.13.11

etienne — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 15:48:51 +0000

> Ubuntu maintain the tree in their infrastructure

Because commercial companies feel more "rich" if they have plenty of code in their source management system?

We should begin to talk about:
- software with no "value": software that you can download off the net from an authoritative source, at any time.
- software with positive "value": software that you can download off the net with patches which improve its usefulness.
- software with negative "value": software that has been downloaded off the net at an unknown date and is not even patched with up-to-date free fixes. It's "value" goes negative at the time of the copy and decreases (goes more toward minus infinity) with time.

The "value" I am referring to here is what the commercial company is selling, not the usefulness of the software.

Stable kernel 3.13.11

nix — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 22:54:48 +0000

Nah, it happened again running an earlier kernel: only NFS is hanging but my network is pretty dependent on NFS and everything soon grinds to a halt (though I haven't yet figured out why /sbin/shutdown hangs given that this machine does no NFS self-mounts: I suspect it's trying to shut down the virtual machines on the box, and they NFS-mount filesystems from it). I now speculate it is caused by 3.14 lockd doing something that stalls all the nfsd kernel threads in whatever NFS server it's talking to (well, it happens in 3.13 and 3.14 both).

Reported to linux-kernel and the nfs list, but I have no real clue how to debug it. It doesn't help that each instance so far has happened after two days of uptime, so debugging it promises to be extremely tiresome. With a poweroff after each instance. My joy is unbounded.

Stable kernel 3.13.11

lkundrak — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:07:26 +0000

I'm wondering why will Ubuntu maintain the tree in their infrastructure? Why not git.kernel.org?

Stable kernel 3.13.11

Otus — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 20:19:24 +0000

> Update: the Ubuntu kernel team has announced that it will be providing ongoing support for 3.13 until April 2016.

Only April 2016? Does that mean all LTS users will be moved to a new series at some point?

Stable kernel 3.13.11

dlang — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 18:30:55 +0000

you should always have your syslog server send it's local logs somewhere else (for just this sort of problem)

logins are probably blocked because syslog is stuck (a login generates log messages)

I've seen this happen when there was a disk I/O hiccup, so it could be the filesystem, or it could be the drive I/O that locked up.

If it's the disk, then you may still be able to run programs that are cached.

Stable kernel 3.13.11

JMB — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 17:18:29 +0000

Is no official support carried on by someone else - as Linux 3.13 is e.g. the base for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS being supported for 5 years ... (as Canonical extended support AFAIK for 3.5 and 3.8)?
I would have expected such an information with this mail ...

Stable kernel 3.13.11

nix — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 17:07:16 +0000

I tried moving to 3.14 a few days ago. Early this morning, the filesystem froze so solid that nothing worked: no invocation of new processes (like dmesg!), all logs dropped (this was the syslog server), NFS lockd stalls, logins freeze, you name it. How on earth I'm supposed to debug *that* I have no idea. netconsole might work, except that this is the machine on the network to which the netconsole logs are directed: having it netconsole to some other machine seems like a recipe for horrible circular deadlocks at boot time :(