[CentOS] wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

Gordon Messmer gordon.messmer at gmail.com
Fri Dec 11 00:10:42 UTC 2015


On 12/10/2015 07:21 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
> If the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
> platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
> distribution and RHEL will follow.

Surely you're not suggesting that the code a developer writes is 
dependent on the form factor of the computer on which they write it?  
I'm sure that idea would shock nearly all of the developers of software 
for both rack mounted servers and embedded devices.

I think it's likely that, instead, you believe that you are 
representative of all of the people who do your job, and that features 
which you do not need are therefore not needed by others. That logic is 
quite normal, but completely wrong.

Take for instance your opinion of power management for NICs.  While 
power management is important to mobile, battery-operated devices, it is 
also desirable in large data centers.  Cooling and power use are big 
issues for data centers, and that feature was intended for that 
environment.  You dismiss it as laptop-oriented technology, but not all 
system administrators do.

> A handful of voices representing server installations, who by
> definition are not development types

"By definition?"  Have you heard of DevOps?  Whatever your opinion of 
that idea, there are definitely server admins who take part in 
development at all levels of the stack.

> A server based distro to us has certain characteristics that are
> orientated to long running processes and system uptimes measured in
> months if not years.  I have given up counting how many times I have
> to reboot all of our CentOS servers in the past year because of
> updates.

I share that frustration, but it has nothing to do with whether or not 
Fedora developers use laptops.  The truth is simply that software 
becomes more complex over time, that there is a growing value in 
attacking computer systems, and that the world is increasingly 
connected.  These things act together to create a situation where bugs 
are more likely in the core components, where it's harder to update a 
system without fully rebooting it.

But there's hope. There are a number of efforts to produce a system to 
update the kernel without reboots (ksplice, kgraft, kpatch, and 
KernelCare).  More developers are writing unit tests.  Code analysis 
tools are improving.  Both the number of bugs produced and the cost of 
fixing them are getting better over time, too.

> We do not need plug-and-play; or usb hot-swapping; or hibernation; or
> screen savers; or audio-video players; or power optimisation.

That's great for you, but some of those things are really valuable for 
system admins, especially those who run *really large* numbers of 
systems.  Power and cooling cost money, so optimization has a lot of 
value.  A lot of those plug-and-play and hot-swapping technologies that 
you deride are essential for high availability systems (such as SAS/SATA 
hot swapping).




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