From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750978AbWAUG7S (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jan 2006 01:59:18 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751004AbWAUG7S (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jan 2006 01:59:18 -0500 Received: from free.wgops.com ([69.51.116.66]:26379 "EHLO shell.wgops.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750974AbWAUG7R (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jan 2006 01:59:17 -0500 Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:58:53 -0700 From: Michael Loftis To: Alan Cox Cc: Greg KH , Jan Engelhardt , Marc Koschewski , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Development tree, PLEASE? Message-ID: <68C3222B770D473165308229@dhcp-2-206.wgops.com> X-Mailer: Mulberry/4.0.4 (Mac OS X) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline X-MailScanner-Information: Please contact support@wgops.com X-MailScanner: WGOPS clean X-MailScanner-From: mloftis@wgops.com Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org --On January 21, 2006 1:38:46 AM +0000 Alan Cox wrote: > On Gwe, 2006-01-20 at 13:56 -0700, Michael Loftis wrote: >> and is fine once getty gets ahold of it, it's just during the initial >> bootup phases where it's being used as the console either by the rc >> scripts or by the kernel that seems to go wonky. It goes out during >> the initial > > A bug where the serial console could get stuck on SMP IFF a kernel and a > non kernel message were output at the same time did get fixed > (yesterday) other than that I'm not aware of any problems in this area > but the maintainer may have more ideas. > > Diff is tiny if you want to see if that is what you hit, although it > would be remarkable co-incidence and luck if it was ;) Coincidence I'm full of, and (bad) luck this week as well it seems. I want to know who's black cat has been crossing my path. This gives me a better direction to test it in. The machines I have the problem with are all running SMP preemptible 2.6.8 on an HT machine with a single physical core, I'll try putting or booting them into a non-SMP kernel...if it's suddenly good, well....we found our rat. That would though explain it pretty well since thinking about it, it doesn't happen in the debian installer nor... i think it's one of the gentoo installers or something...and those are 386 non-SMP kernels. Might've found some sort of wacky edge-case that can reproduce that bug reliably. I'd be much appreciative if you pass a link or the diff itself along to me (or a specific bit to look for in archives/etc). It might, or might not, be my little gremlin. In the meantime I just leave off console=ttyS1,38400 and hold my breath while they boot. > >> printk output, or sometimes later...exactly when seems to be a bit of a >> random thing. Also it either causes, or is inputting NULL's or some >> other (consistent) garbage (CRLF? instead of CR?) on these same blades. >> So you > > Never seen CR, nul reported. Would the blades happen to use rlogin to > manage this remote serial do you know ? No...telnet...though...I just realised I haven't verified that on anything but the BSD based telnet program on Mac OS X, and FreeBSD 4.11(ish), so really, it might be something there too, but again, 2.4 never sees these issues, and I'm really not sure what's getting into the stream, I think nul because I get a '^@' translated back at me, which IIRC is the representation for nul but lord knows if that's from the telnet client after it echos or what, I haven't done a packet dump of this gremlin, yet. > >> I think I have more kernel bugs and can go on, but I'll just be told >> 'upgrade to 2.6.15' which is not an option in many cases if these are >> indeed development releases, if only 'politically', but there are often >> real costs involved. And with nowhere to put patches that end up in > > Its hard to maintain an old release and just merge all the fixes into it > backporting when neccessary. At the kernel summit before 2.6 this was > discussed a lot. There are a small number of groups of people who wanted > this for the long term. Said groups either maintain such trees and sell > support/services for money, or rebuild the output of the former as a > community project. > > It therefore seemed reasonable that those who want it should bear the > cost, or figure out how to maintain such backports between themselves. OK atleast I'm not total net.kook here. >> maintenance releases we're forced to maintain our own private forks, and >> likely, because of the GPL, also publish these forks and incur all the >> costs associated with that directly, and hope they don't become >> popular/wanted outside of the customer base they're intended for, or >> skirt the GPL, and only allow customers access to this stuff. > > The GPL is very careful about this. If you ship the sources to your > customers then you have done your duty. If your customers choose to give > it to others so be it. If the others ask you for changes then I believe > the phrase is "business opportunity". > >> whatever their version numbers are. I'm in an odd position of working >> for a web hosting company, *and* doing my own Linux consulting as well, >> and maintaining some 'embedded distros' used in these specific niche >> applications. > > Embedded can be more problematic because it is harder to spread the > load, but there are communities of people who looked at things like Red > Hat Enterprise Linux and decided that they could use the code but didn't > currently need/want the training, support and services that are what > really makes it. One obvious example is Centos which is a community tree > derived from the RHEL work, rebuilt, rebranded without > support/services/etc and downloadable for free. Yeah, embedded certainly is its own special little corner of heaven or hell depending on your view, or whims.