On 2/25/11 4:48 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>
>> Anyway, my point was that the fabled library ABI stability of RHEL turned out
>> not to work for VMware Server 2.0. But CentOS did come through with
>> bug-for-bug compatibility as promised, causing the same crashing behavior after
>> the same minor-rev update.
>>
>
> The ABI is not for things like VMWare when they screw up their updates
This was not a VMWare update. It was a glibc update - and the breakage was
dramatic, not just the slow memory leak someone else mentioned.
> ... it is for custom 3rd party software that you have spent
> $1,000,000.00 having developed that will stop working when the ABI changes.
Can you elaborate on that? I thought ABI stabity was a yes or no kind of
question. What's different about VMWare other than RH selling a similar product?
> In the case of VMWare, they support RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. out
> of the box and they made a mistake with their RH compile.
It seemed really odd - because at least the next few VMWare updates didn't fix
it and they aren't exactly new at this game. The multi-distribution support
mostly comes from including a bazillion libraries in the package that the
distributions refuse to standardize enough to count on, but that doesn't include
glibc... The workaround to switch to ESXi or Server 1.x was straightforward
enough so I don't need more advice about that, but the situation seemed like
more than a simple mistake. Does anyone have inside information on why it
happened and wasn't fixed immediately by one side or the other?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com