[SSI-users] Binary release and future kernel development

[Brian J. W. <Bri...@hp...>]

The 0.9.6 binary release should be ready tomorrow. It seems run well on 
my test cluster, but there's a bug John would like to fix before 
releasing it.

Some of you might wonder why it takes so long between doing the source 
release and doing the binary release. The reason is that the source 
release is based on plain vanilla Linux 2.4.18, whereas the binary 
release is based on Red Hat's 2.4.18-18 kernel. The two have significant 
differences that affect the OpenSSI implementation. The latest feature 
enhancements and bug fixes from the vanilla-based version of OpenSSI do 
not always merge cleanly with the Red Hat-based version, and the 
conflicts are typically in code that someone else developed. I have to 
make intelligent guesses and consult with the appropriate developer 
about how to resolve each conflict. Even after this, there are still 
compile-time and run-time bugs to be fixed. As a result I suspect the 
binary release is less stable than the source release.

So now you might be wondering why the source and binary releases use 
different code bases. The answer is that in the beginning we were doing 
just source releases and wanted to be distribution-agnostic by basing it 
on the vanilla kernel. This was fine for development, but not 
necessarily for an end-user. A few months ago when Bruce asked me to 
roll our first binary release for end-users, he realized they would not 
want to give up the bug fixes and additional features that Red Hat has 
and vanilla Linux doesn't. He decided the binary release should be based 
on the latest Red Hat kernel.

Lately I've been thinking it would be best to do all development on the 
Red Hat kernel to avoid the merging and instability problems described 
above. I'm not suggesting that we abandon the vanilla kernel; if someone 
wants to take the responsibility to periodically merge new code with it 
and roll releases based on it, I'd be more than happy to tell you how to 
do that.

Let me know what you think,

Brian