On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Roman Kennke <rken...@redhat.com> wrote:
> > Today something happened, that happens over and over again with Fedora, > > and it makes me angry. I am running Fedora 17, and so far it worked well > > with the initial kernel 3.3.x (except that it would panic on shutdown... > > but that was not important to me, but still embarassing). Today I was > > notified of an important security update in the kernel. Curiously, it > > would update from 3.3 to 3.4 (a major version upgrade, which should not > > happen in such a core package anyway, IMO). Reboot into the new kernel, > > everything comes up --- until I want to actually want to read email, > > surf web, or anything that requires my network. I am on an Intel Wifi > > card, iwlwifi module. I *can* connect to the network, but everything is > > suuuuuuper slow or times-out every now and then. Completely unusable. > > Reboot into the older kernel, things work well again. Now I am left with > > the choice of running a new kernel w/o network or an unsecure kernel. > > Thank you very much! > > > > This sort of thing I would expect in rawhide/development builds, but not > > in a supposed-to-be stable release. I can understand the underlying idea > > of being on the bleeding edge, but I don't want to actually be bleeding. > > At least the base system components should not undergo major version > > updates. Security fixes should be backported to the software version > > that is in the stable release (1 year release cycle shouldn't be too > > demanding for this), and only security fixes and absolutely important > > fixes should go into stable releases. (Not to mention that some fixes > > that I *would* consider important enough to go into stable never end up > > there.) If major version updates are really really necessary, they > > should undergo serious testing. I cannot believe that I am the only one > > on an Intel Wifi chip. The way it is now, Fedora feels like a constantly > > rolling development version that is almost unusable (because any update, > > even security, has a fairly high risk of breaking things) for day-to-day > > work. > > > > Bugzilla report: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=831571 > > Since I just received an email in private pointing out that emails like > mine above might be discouraging and not helpful... let me apologize for > this. My intention is not to bash other people's best efforts, but > instead try to help out (otherwise I would not bother to diligently file > bugreports and mention my concerns on this list). I am willing to help > track down and fix the problem. However, I see a more general problem > and maybe we can turn this into a discussion how to address (or answer) > it. > > - Why do we allow new major versions of core components into a stable > release? What sort of testing is performed before a major kernel update > hits Fedora stable? > - What is the policy with regards to risky changes (like unnecessary > feature updates, ABI changes, etc) in stable? > - How can problems like the one I described above be avoided? Is there > anything I and others can help with? > > Roman > > > -- > devel mailing list > devel@lists.fedoraproject.org > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel > I think the reason for shipping the latest upstream kernel is based on the fact that backporting would be too much work. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelRebases Gives a good overview and probably prevents us from repeating arguments in the discussion. Johannes
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