Another slip in the FC6 schedule

Alfredo Ferrari list at pceet030.cern.ch
Tue Oct 17 22:26:09 UTC 2006


You are right, but when you have to deal with 50+ machines you tend to 
automatize updates for obvious reasons.

Further, no warning has been issued, I just saw the thread by chance.
Even on my personal machines where I do things by hand, I downloaded the 
new kernels yesterday, rebuilt them with some extra patches (ntfs,
initrd dsdt for my buggy laptop etc), installed them together with the old 
one, tested for one day (they are under heavy load anyway), tested
also (and built the drivers for) hardware acceleration, wireless, dumb 
Conexant modem etc etc. and eventually I deinstalled the old kernel just 
before reading that message. 
It is not a big deal to reinstall the previous kernel on those machines,
crossing fingers that nothing happened to the 1k partitions,
much tougher on the cluster, but I really miss the rationale of having a
kernel update in those conditions (the bug was know as far as I 
understand).
                   Alfredo

On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Jose Celestino wrote:

> Words by Alfredo Ferrari [Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 12:05:14AM +0200]:
>> Seriously, I believe this is a big issue. Let me summarize:
>>
>> a) there was a kernel update for FC5
>> b) this kernel has a known bug which could results in corrupting
>>    ext3 filesystems with 1k block size under heavy load
>> c) ... nevertheless it has been pushed out with no special warning
>> d) pratically all /boot partitions are ext3 1k (anaconda generated)
>> e) many partitions on old machine upgraded from previous versions are
>>    ext3 1k as well
>> f) experienced users could have much bigger partitions manually
>>    generated with 1k block size for their own fun/reasons/optimization (I
>>    personally have counted  already 400 GBytes of 1k, ext3, partitions
>>    just on my personal laptop, desktop and associated backup disks
>>    excluding /boot ones). In my case, most of the 1k partitions are such
>>    because they are subject to heavy loads with many small files
>>
>> What was the rationale for releasing an official kernel update under such
>> dangerous conditions? Just "anaconda doesn't generate 1k partitions (not true BTW)"? I still believe Linux is not (yet) Windows
>>
>
> Thank god no. But the growing user base is more and more windows like.
>
> Thankfuly many of us know that you shouldn't push every and all upgrade to
> production servers as soon as it comes. And also thankfuly there are
> those who do just that.
>
>

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