Re: Vmware, RHEL4 confusion

[Aleksandar Milivojevic <alex milivojevic org>]

Quoting John Horne <john horne plymouth ac uk>:

> You see, to me that isn't 'supporting' RHEL4. If I have to recompile
> something whenever a new kernel is released then it's not a supported
> product. If it was supported then I should be able to install RHEL4U2
> and allow up2date to upgrade the system to update 3, and reboot with no
> problems.

The lack of stable device driver API is well known design flaw of Linux 
kernel.  And it is intential flaw (less to do with performance and 
flexibility of the kernel, more to do with forcing commercial vendors 
to provide drivers in source code).  Therefore you need to recompile 
device drivers that are not included in default distribution every time 
you upgrade your kernel.  That's the Linux philosophy.  If you don't 
like that, you can either send complaints to Linus or switch to 
Solaris.  Nothing to do with VmWare, and VmWare can't do anything about 
it.

> As originally said we have one live RHEL4 server and that cannot be
> rebuilt (only just gone live so the users would be really annoyed if we
> took it offline). What I have been asked is if we can retrofit the
> relevant SCSI driver which would then allow us to upgrade the kernel.
> (The server has been upgraded to RHEL4U3 through up2date, but we are
> still using the 2.6.9-5 kernel because of the driver problem.)

You can install the new kernel and build device driver without taking 
offline your production server.  You do not need to rebuild/reinstall 
the server.  Simply install new kernel (rpm -ihv kernel-rpm), mount 
floppy you got from VmWare, copy source code for device driver 
somewhere to local disk and compile it.  When done compiling, copy it 
to /lib/modules/kernel-version/kernel/drivers/scsi, rebuild initrd 
image (you can run it with -v to make sure BusLogic device driver is 
included) and reboot.  Than't the Linux way of doing things.  Either 
get used to it or switch to Solaris.

You said one of your guests is test machine.  You can use it to make 
sure the above procedure works.

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