[CentOS] Panic / EL6 / KVM / kernel-2.6.32-754.2.1.el6.x86_64

Thu Aug 30 12:13:51 UTC 2018
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On Thu, 30 Aug 2018 at 05:41, Leon Fauster via CentOS <centos at centos.org>
wrote:

>
>
>
> > There goes a cheap and reliable VM dev machine :-/
>
>
> No way. Should all IT departments trash a big percentage of there hardware
> now?
>
>
I am going to say from chip and OEM manufacturers view points: yes. For at
least the last 15 years, they have priced out their hardware to have a 4-6
year lifetime. Consumers of said hardware are supposed to plan around that
with magical budget money and replace their hardware regularly. Since
rarely do people have said money, we have mostly gotten away with having
not having to do so because big things like this don't happen very often.
[The last big one was all the working hardware people had to get rid of for
Y2K.]

The fixes to the old hardware are going to be problematic for a lot of
different reasons (Intel isn't fixing its microcode, backporting deep
kernel rewrites to very old kernels tends to crash a lot, etc.) I would
recommend one of the following strategies:

1. Let your budget know that there will be a lot of replacements coming up.
Replace hardware as you can.
2. Make a decision about what your security risk is for this problem, stick
to an old kernel and put virtual systems which match your security risk on
the old hardware.
3. Test a newer kernel/release on the hardware and see if the problem does
not occur on it. If it does, then it is doubtful that the fix can be
backported until it is fixed in the newer version. If it doesn't then it
might help figure out where the breakage is.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.