[SSI-users] Re: [SSI-devel] Binary release and future kernel development

[Aneesh K. K.V <ane...@di...>]

Hi Brian,

Firstly by doing this we are going to have problems with architectures
that redhat doesn't support. I am worried about alpha here. As of now
their kernel build and runs on alpha. Thanks to some people still
interested in alpha inside redhat. But i am not sure for how long they
are going to do that. Another important thing to note is that by making
the development against redhat kernel we are making it more difficult to
port  open-ssi to other architectures. ( One of my friend was talking to
me about sparc... ) 


Redhat add many bug fixes and  also do back porting of many new features
into the kernel. But i don't think any bug fix which the user really
want is missed from the vanilla kernel. Regarding enhancement the entire
kernel team consider most of these changes  not ready for 2.4. 

If it is difficult to get the changes merged back to redhat kernel, I
would say we can make  binary releases of vanilla kernel rather than
switching to redhat kernels. I can  say  by looking at open-mosix
download statistics, lot of people will still be using the binary
release of vanilla kernel.  If you really see the early users of
open-ssi for that matter any project than brings changes to kernel, they
all are people who can afford more than one machines for trying out new
stuff. This include people who are rich enough to afford many machine (
I don't have even one :( ) , students and research people. I don't think
any of this class worry about redhat patches. Do we have anybody running
open-ssi on production systems ?.


Following the vanilla kernel make sure at some point in future there is
a chance of getting merged with main line Linux kernel. 


-aneesh 
On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 05:40, Brian J. Watson wrote:
> 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