You are right, but when you have to deal with 50+ machines you tend to
automatize updates for obvious reasons.
Further, no warning has been issued, I just saw the thread by chance.
Even on my personal machines where I do things by hand, I downloaded the
new kernels yesterday, rebuilt them with some extra patches (ntfs,
initrd dsdt for my buggy laptop etc), installed them together with the old
one, tested for one day (they are under heavy load anyway), tested
also (and built the drivers for) hardware acceleration, wireless, dumb
Conexant modem etc etc. and eventually I deinstalled the old kernel just
before reading that message.
It is not a big deal to reinstall the previous kernel on those machines,
crossing fingers that nothing happened to the 1k partitions,
much tougher on the cluster, but I really miss the rationale of having a
kernel update in those conditions (the bug was know as far as I
understand).
Alfredo
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Jose Celestino wrote:
Words by Alfredo Ferrari [Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 12:05:14AM +0200]:
Seriously, I believe this is a big issue. Let me summarize:
a) there was a kernel update for FC5
b) this kernel has a known bug which could results in corrupting
ext3 filesystems with 1k block size under heavy load
c) ... nevertheless it has been pushed out with no special warning
d) pratically all /boot partitions are ext3 1k (anaconda generated)
e) many partitions on old machine upgraded from previous versions are
ext3 1k as well
f) experienced users could have much bigger partitions manually
generated with 1k block size for their own fun/reasons/optimization (I
personally have counted already 400 GBytes of 1k, ext3, partitions
just on my personal laptop, desktop and associated backup disks
excluding /boot ones). In my case, most of the 1k partitions are such
because they are subject to heavy loads with many small files
What was the rationale for releasing an official kernel update under such
dangerous conditions? Just "anaconda doesn't generate 1k partitions (not true BTW)"? I still believe Linux is not (yet) Windows
Thank god no. But the growing user base is more and more windows like.
Thankfuly many of us know that you shouldn't push every and all upgrade to
production servers as soon as it comes. And also thankfuly there are
those who do just that.
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