[CentOS-devel] Balancing the needs around the RHEL platform

On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 12:39 PM redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel
<centos-devel at centos.org> wrote:
>
> On Thursday, December 31, 2020 6:49 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Back to CentOS Stream. One of the CentOS kernel advantages was that
> > Red Hat apparently did test suites across a wide variety of hardware
> > before considering a kernel for release. I'm afraid CentOS Stream
> > kernels won't have that regression testing done.
>
> I am not sure that is true.
>
> Stef Walter has given the closest to technical insight driving this decision here:
>
> https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/centos-stream-is-continuous-delivery/
>
> The blog post is broken into four parts.  The fourth part comes the closest to talking about the need for better *automated* hardware testing.  There are two key components that talks directly to the hardware that you never want to fail, GRUB and the kernel.  The blog post talks about how an issue with GRUB cause systems not to boot, but given regressions with the kernel can have the same impact, I think they see it just as important to test that as well.
>
> Rather than the problem being if hardware testing will take place, I believe the problem will be if regression tests will be complete.  Reading between the lines (hopefully Stef Walter can correct me if I'm wrong), Red Hat seems to be "asking" for feedback on what areas they need to add regression tests.

It's expensive to set up. i used to do that for hardware and OS
deployment testing for a network of over 10,000 systems, and keeping
my racks populated with all the different hardware variants was... an
adventure. Back in the days of LILO rather than grub, it used to be
possible to set the boot loader to consider one kernel as the
"default", but to beet the next time with a designated kernel one time
only. It made testing kernels safer because a failed kernel
installation failed reboot only *once* and only needed a power cycle
to revert. I don't believe grub has ever been successfully patched to
support this: I'd welcome it if they did, though i'm not testing
hardware and kernels these days.