Kernel Modules in Fedora -x

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Tue Aug 7 22:08:53 UTC 2007


Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>> "Not helping" is unrelated to actively breaking in mid-version updates.
>>  If you plan the latter, just say so up front - and in a way that 
>> points  out this difference from RHEL.  And anyone who wants current 
>> apps on a box that keeps working will just have to learn a different 
>> administration style.
> 
> If you are saying that Fedora is intentionally breaking third party 
> proprietary modules that would be misleading. Fedora stays close to 
> upstream versions and pulling upstream versions can sometimes break 
> these modules. Sometimes new versions are needed for security fixes. In 
> other cases it brings in bug fixes or new desired functionality.

I'm not suggesting that fedora modifies the ABI arbitrarily just to 
encourage users to switch to RHEL, but if there is there is no 
expectation that 3rd party drivers that work at the beginning of a 
version will work after the first update, I think that should be stated 
more clearly.

>> I didn't think there was anything unusual or proprietary about my 
>> firewire drives or the IBM 225's either - but they both went through 
>> many months of not working with various fedora kernels.
> 
> This isn't Fedora specific issue.

It is from the perspective I'm trying to get across.  I installed and 
tested a fedora version with the drives in question.  They stopped 
working after some updates, mid-version.

> All distributions suffered from the 
> same problems. Firewire layer in the upstream kernel wasn't robust 
> enough previously. Red Hat rewrote it and it was in Fedora 7 and it 
> hasn't been merged upstream now in the latest kernel.

The change that broke things was never pushed into the Centosplus 
version I ended up using.  If fedora must send every new and untested 
change on to the users, how about some easier way to avoid them if they 
break your hardware, like making kernel updates opt-in within a release 
version?  An install option that offered to reserve alternate system 
partitions so you can revert to a known-working version with access to 
your current home directory after installing the next might be nice too.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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