[gentoo-user] Re: What's happened to gentoo-sources?

[Kai Krakow]

Am Sun, 21 Aug 2016 07:28:17 -0400
schrieb Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>:

> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Peter Humphrey
> <peter@××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> > On Sunday 21 Aug 2016 05:55:06 Rich Freeman wrote:
> >> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 5:12 AM, Peter Humphrey
> >> <peter@××××××××××××.uk>
> > wrote:
>  [...]
> >>
> >> No idea, but upstream is up to 4.4.19, and 4.6.7 (which is now
> >> EOL). So, those are pretty old versions.  I see 4.4.19 in the
> >> Gentoo repo, and 4.7.2 (which is probably where 4.6 users should
> >> be moving to).
> >
> > Yes, this ~amd64 box is now at 4.7.2, but I have an amd64 and two
> > x86 systems and they both want to downgrade to 4.1.15-r1, which eix
> > shows as the latest stable version.
> >
> > I thought 4.4.6 and 4.6.4 were both pretty stable; was I wrong?
> >
>
> I'm sure they both work.  However, upstream has released numerous
> fixes since 4.4.6, and they will not be releasing security/bug/etc
> fixes for 4.6.x.
>
> As long as there are no critical issues there is no issue with not
> being completely up-to-date with the kernel's stable releases, and I'm
> sure the Gentoo kernel team is tracking these sorts of issues.
> However, it isn't a surprise that they dropped 4.6.  If they
> downgraded 4.1 I suspect that was a mistake somewhere along the ways -
> I could see them upgrading it to something more recent.
>
> And there is nothing wrong with having some internal QA on kernel
> releases.  4.1 had a nasty memory leak a release or two ago that was
> killing my system after only an hour or two uptime.  They took over a
> week to stabilize the fix as well (though a patch was out fairly
> quickly).  So, I'm not in nearly the rush to update kernels as I used
> to be (granted, unless you read all the lists it is easy to miss this
> sort of thing).

Surprise surprise, 4.7 has this (still not fully fixed) oom-killer bug.
When I'm running virtual machines, it still kicks in. I wanted to stay
on 4.6.x until 4.8 is released, and only then switch to 4.7. Now I was
forced early (I'm using btrfs), and was instantly punished by doing so:

The bfq patches I used were unstable (IO ops froze during boot, I was
forced to hard-reset the system) and as a consequence btrfs eventually
broke down a few hours later after the kernel booted without using bfq.

I had to restore from backup. Gentoo could have simply masked 4.6.x
with a masking message instead of removing it completely without
warning. I'm now using deadline instead of bfq, and I'm not using cfq
because it is everything else but running an interactive system
regarding IO: have some more than normal background IO and desktop
becomes unusable, audio and video apps starts skipping, games start
freezing up to a minute.

I'm now on 4.7.2 and I'm not happy due to the oom-killer mess. And
going back to 4.4 or even 4.1 is probably an unrealistic option when
using btrfs - at least I don't want to test it.

> I really wish the kernel had separate
> announce/discussion/patch lists.  It is really annoying that there is
> no way to get official notices up upstream updates without subscribing
> to lkml and such.  Is Linux the only FOSS project that has never heard
> of -announce lists?
>
> I ended up bailing on gentoo-sources all the same.  Not that there was
> really anything wrong with it, but since I'm running btrfs and they've
> had a history of nasty regressions that tend to show up MONTHS later
> I've been a lot more picky about my kernel updates.  I'm currently
> tracking 4.1.  I might think about moving to 4.4 in a little while.  I
> tend to stay on the next-to-most-recent longterm not long after a new
> longterm is announced.  That tends to give them enough time to work
> out the bugs.  Plus, I spend a lot less time playing with
> configuration options this way (they don't change within a minor
> version).

This is why I wanted to stay major version behind currently stable -
I'm using btrfs, too. And history shows that especially 4.x.{0,1} may
introduce some nasty bugs if you are using edge technology like btrfs.

As I said, I'm not happy with this situation currently but I arranged
to live with it for the time being.

With btrfs gaining no must-have features lately, I'm considering to
stay with stable gentoo-sources when it switches to the unstable
version I'm currently using - which might be 4.7 or 4.8, I'm not sure.
I don't trust 4.7 currently, so I hope it will be 4.8.

-- 
Regards,
Kai

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