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Re: kernel summit session on systemtap


Just in case anyone actually cares about what the reality is behind the
perception, the "kerneloops #3" issue in fact has zero to do with the
"utrace sucks" question.  (No issue of substance was raised about utrace at
the conference, for either good or ill.)  That quip, and the kerneloops
top-10 list that provoked it, was during a general "kernel stability"
discussion.  The real cause of "kerneloops #3" is another point that was
mentioned in that discussion--kernel hackers only care about bleeding edge
upstream/rawhide.

Of that one, I am indeed thoroughly guilty (like, I think, most people in
the room).  This crash was a trivial one-line bug (typo level of depth),
which I had fixed very shortly after introducing it, and had not been in
the "current" code (i.e. my git tree, or f10/rawhide kernels) for weeks.
It was fixed well before the version of utrace patches posted to LKML this
month, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the stress-test crash cases
being discussed there.  (Those are crashes you have to try hard to get.
They are obviously valid issues to raise about merging the utrace code
upstream, but they are a thousand miles from anything that would ever rise
to the kerneloops top 10 because average users hit them frequently.)

Being behind on at least five other things far more interesting to me, I
had just let "check what is up with the F9 kernel" fall down to the bottom
of my queue and kept it quite out of my mind.  Getting laughed at by a
roomful of people to whom I was not inclined to explain the difference
between "I can't be bothered to maintain backports this month even when
they're crashing" and "I write code that sucks ass" made me spend the 15
minutes during lunch it took to remember/find the silly one-liner I'd
nearly forgotten about, and commit that fix to F-9 kernel cvs right then.

A build with that fix still hasn't made it even to F-9 updates-testing,
about which you'll have to ask cebbert (who was also in the room to feel
that derision about Fedora kernel quality).


Thanks,
Roland


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