Enterprise distro kernels
Greg K-H wrote recently about kernels for “Enterprise Linux” distributions. I’m not sure I get the premise of the article; after all, the whole point of having more than one distro company is that they can compete on the basis of the differences in what they do. So it makes no sense to me to present this issue as something that Red Hat and Novell have to agree on (and it also leaves out Ubuntu’s “LTS” distribution, although I’m not sure if that has taken any of the “enterprise distro” market). Obviously Novell sees a reason for both openSUSE and SLES; why should SLES and RHEL have to be identical?
In fact (although Greg didn’t seem to realize it when he wrote his article), there are already significant differences between the SLES and RHEL kernel updates. SLES has relatively infrequent “SP” releases, where the kernel ABI is allowed to break, while RHEL has update releases roughly every quarter but aims to keep the kernel ABI stable through the life of a full major release.
Greg seems to favor the third proposal in his article, namely rebasing to the latest upstream kernel on every update. However, I don’t think that can work for enterprise distros, for a reason that DaveJ alluded to in his response:
W[ith] each upstream point revision, we fix x regressions, and introduce y new ones. This isn’t going to make enterprise customers paying lots of $ each year very happy.
For a lot of customers, the whole point of staying on an enterprise distro is to stick with something that works for them. No kernel is bug-free and every enterprise distro kernel surely has some awful bugs; what enterprise customers want to avoid are regressions. If SLES10 works for my app on my hardware, then SLES10SP1 better not keel over on the same app and the same hardware because of a broken SATA driver or something like that.
Of course customers often want crazy-sounding stuff, for example, “Give me the 2.6.9 kernel from RHEL4, except I want the InfiniBand drivers from 2.6.21.” (And yes, since I work on InfiniBand a lot, that is definitely a real example, and in fact a lot of effort goes into the “OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution” (OFED) to make those customers happy) A kernel hacker’s first reaction to that request is most likely, “Then you should run just 2.6.21.” But if you think about what the customers are asking for some more, it starts to make sense. What they are really saying is that they need the latest and greatest IB features (maybe support for new hardware or a protocol that wasn’t implemented until long after the enterprise kernel was frozen), but they don’t want to risk some new glitch in a part of the kernel where RHEL4’s 2.6.9 is perfectly fine for them.
This is just a special case of Greg’s “support the latest toy” request, and if there were some technical solution for pulling just a subset of new features into an enterprise kernel then that would be great. But as I said before, without a major change in the upstream development process, rebasing enterprise kernels during the lifetime of a major release doesn’t seem to be what customers of enterprise distros want. And I agree with Linus when he says that you can’t slow down development without having people losing interest or going off onto a branch that’s too unstable for real users to test. So I don’t think we want to change our development process to be closer to an enterprise distro.
And given how new features often have dependencies on core kernel changes, I don’t see much hope of a technical solution for the “latest toy” problem. In fact the OFED solution of having the community that works on a particular class of new toys do the backporting seems to
be about the best we can do for now.
Syndicated 2007-06-24 16:21:45 from Roland's Blog