Distro kernel update

[Dave Jones]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 05:34:42PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:

 > > A few questions spring to my mind:
 > 
 > I'll give my personal answers.  If Dave or Chuck disagree, I'm sure
 > they''ll do so publicly :).

Spot on as far as I'm concerned.
 
 > I will point out though that we continue to try and avoid deviation from
 > upstream as much as possible.  Aside from fixes, there are really only a
 > small handful of add-on patches in the Fedora kernels.  utrace and the
 > i686 nx/execshield are the biggest and hopefully those also sort of go
 > away.  Hopefully the _need_ for vanilla kernels is fairly small.

Some of the lower hanging fruit got pushed again this cycle.
When we move to 3.2, the fedora specific patches should be the smallest
they've been in a long time.

(related: I'm tempted to remove all the vanilla stuff from the spec
just to reduce some of the noise in there.  Any objections ?
I think Roland was the only person who ever really used it)
 
 > > And does it really has to be that strict?
 > 
 > Yes.  Staging drivers can be a huge timesink, particularly when users
 > think they are getting something that will JUST WORK for their hardware
 > and then it turns out to be a steaming pile of crap.

Something worth pointing out, is that if there's enough demand from users
for a specific driver to be cleaned up so we can support it, in some cases
we may be in a position where we can task someone with that.
We used to do a lot more of this sort of thing in the Red Hat Linux days
than we have done in Fedora. 

 > >  * Will updates like the one to 3.0/2.6.40 in F15 be considered normal
 > > practice again for the future? Updates to latest kernel versions in the
 > > latest Fedora release where nothing unusual in the past, but it always
 > > bugged me that they happened to be so unpredictable (got way worse in
 > > the past year afaics)t
 > 
 > I'm guessing it will be normal practice, yes.  Being somewhat new here,
 > I'm not sure why it fell out of practice.  Updating to the latest has a
 > couple of factors involved with it, so it's not always a simple decision.

I think f14 was the tail end of the "don't update the kernel because X will
crap itself" problems. (Probably even sooner actually, but paranoia kept us
on .35 forever).

Going forward, I think it's pretty clear to see that it's worth continually moving
just like we used to.  Yes we introduce new bugs every time, but we close out
a lot more. The .40 update closed over a hundred bugs with little or no actual
intervention on our part. (And probably more that just haven't retested/updated bz yet).
Additionally being able to bug upstream with bugs on recent codebases instead
of something from a year ago is invaluable.

	Dave