On 12/11/20 7:02 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 6:43 AM Louis Lagendijk louis@fazant.net wrote:
Now For Stream I am mainly worried about 2 things: 1 - the kernel and its impact on drivers from Elrepo and other external repos (OpenZFS!). Not important for RHEL, but important for people that use old hardware that requires drivers not in RHEL.
Others have expressed this concern, and it's a good one. It would be interesting to see if someone could create a CentOS Stream SIG that did automated rebuilds of those drivers with every Stream kernel update.
As part of this, having the kernel version pinned to the current kmod is useful; don't update the kernel if all dependent kmods aren't available in updated form. For that matter, keeping the versions of the kmod installed for the still-installed older kernels would be very useful; that way you can always boot into the older kernel and things will still work. (for instance, on our R710s, once you update kmod-megaraid_sas to the version for the new kernel you can't boot the older kernel, and there may be circumstances where that might be necessary). Or maybe this is just a job for the CentOSPlus kernel, if it were available on installation media.
There are probably ways that people can still selectively update based on what changed, but it is true that Stream will have a more frequent cadence. However, it's worth pointing out that the update frequency isn't the same across the entire package set. We have packages in RHEL that rarely update, and if they do they are for bugfixes. Only a portion undergoes a lot of activity every minor release.
The difficulty here will be with updates that require a reboot.