CentOS - Jul 2010 - Follow Up - Centos / Red Hat EL Broken 5.4 + 5.5, ** Alternative solution **

To the list:

1) Someone off the list (thanks!) offered to send me an RT kernel based 
on 2.6.23.X.  So I thought why not try to build a standard / server type 
based on the standard 2.6.23 version.

2) Red Hat 6 Beta 2 is based on a similar starting point

3) I was not going to fix something Red Hat broke. They responded to me 
that they only support the configuration of the generic binary they 
ship. This is the answer I received from them for bug # 558367

"Jarod Wilson      2010-07-14 13:40:06 EDT

Officially, Red Hat does not support rebuilds of its kernel with 
configurations other than the one Red Hat ships. You're welcome to 
submit a patch to fix the build, which will be considered for inclusion, 
and/or wait for someone here to have the time to work on this, but there 
are only so many hours in the day. Most of Red Hat engineering is busy 
working on problems related to configurations that Red Hat *does* 
support. If this is a particularly serious issue for you though, you're 
welcome to try to escalate it through customer
support.    "

/Flame proof on

This answer brings to light some very serious limitations. First, if you 
want to turn on a standard kernel feature and its broken (like what I 
tried), it is not officially supported by Red Hat nor Centos.

Therefore, xfs, ntfs, and many other features quite a few of us use may 
be broken at any time when the upstream provider "fixes or updates" a 
kernel.

/Flame proof off/

  I am just stating a warning based on an official answer.
  NO OPINION OFFERED OR IMPLIED

Now for the fix....

No, it was not me that fixed this. I just thought maybe we should try a 
kernel that has been thoroughly tested by the "kernel people".

I used the kernel.org, 2.6.23.17 kernel
I used the old .config from the latest Centos 5.5 src.rpm
Ran make oldconfig
I answered most new questions with the default
I enabled AMD Opteron, Disabled optimize for size and changed the 
default CPU frequency governor to performance.
I turned off isdn, infiniband, ATM and a few others (we don't use them)
I turned on NTFS and with writes (it was broken in 5.2), xfs and jfs

then make; make install_modules
mkinitrd ; edit grub; reboot

This seems to work fine on a standard Centos 5.5 x86_64 install. I am 
going to run this on a test server for a few weeks and see how well it 
works. If I see any issues I will report them but so far it works just fine

-- 
Seth Bardash

Integrated Solutions and Systems LLC
A Metso IT Consultant

719-495-5866   Shop Phone
719-386-0218   Metso Phone
719-337-4779   Cell

seth at integratedsolutions.org
Failure cannot survive knowledge and perseverance!

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 09:25:55AM -0600, Seth Bardash wrote:
> Officially, Red Hat does not support rebuilds of its kernel with   
> configurations other than the one Red Hat ships.
In other news; water is wet, flames are hot, night follows day.

But back to our lead story where RedHat only supports their approved
configurations
> This answer brings to light some very serious limitations. First, if you 
> want to turn on a standard kernel feature and its broken (like what I 
> tried), it is not officially supported by Red Hat nor Centos.
> Therefore, xfs, ntfs, and many other features quite a few of us use may 
> be broken at any time when the upstream provider "fixes or
updates" a
> kernel.
An analyst responds: "Well, duh!  If you change configurations from the
vendor approved values and things break then you get to keep the pieces.
The vendor disabled these for a reason; eg unsupportable, unreliable, not
enterprise level stable..."

And that's all from us at News Of The Obvious.  Good night!

-- 

rgds
Stephen