On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 7:15 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 4:38 PM Phil Perry pperry@elrepo.org wrote:
If Red Hat really wanted to fix this in (a) kernel, the solution would have been to accept the repeated upstream requests to backport the driver into the RHEL kernel, but that idea/request has been rejected.
No. The correct fix here is to start blocking RHEL kernel updates against third-party Free Software kernel module packages to ensure compatibility isn't broken and the kernel ABI stops breaking on every kernel version series. The reason it keeps breaking is because there's no current mechanism in which these are tested together to validate them for release.
I think you are correct. I also think there is a long-ish road to get here. :-) Overall, it would have the best long-term results. It requires everyone that has requirements, document their requirements as automated tests.
But, it would put a damper on "new feature that needs large kernel ABI changes to cost effectively backport", such as the OverlayFS changes done in RHEL 7 as one of many such examples. The choice to use Linux 4.18 is particularly problematic, since it wasn't an LTS kernel. :-(
5 years is a long time to wait for new breaking features in the kernel.
More than most, I get why you're upset about the kABI always breaking as kernel updates push out, but instead of just saying "it's not suitable", we should be building solutions to *make* it suitable for the Enterprise. It's *bad* that the RHEL kernel breaks its own promises so often (which is a relatively new thing, in my experience), and we should be implementing safeguards to stop it from happening going forward.
Yes. Although, in the mean-time...