CentOS - Dec 2015 - wifi on servers and fedora [was Re: 7.2 kernel panic on boot]

On Wed, December 9, 2015 16:50, James Hogarth wrote:
> On 9 Dec 2015 9:07 p.m., "Lamar Owen" <lowen at pari.edu>
wrote:
>>
>
>> No, it seems to me that a suitably motivated CentOS user needs to
>> scratch this itch; and, no, I am not volunteering, as I've
>> followed Fedora before......and just simply cannot give the
>> time to it at this point in time in my life.
>>
>
> <snip>
>
>>
>> So who wants to be the CentOS-Users to Fedora liaison, likely to be
>> one of the most thankless jobs on the planet?
>>
>>
>
> I'm an active Fedora packager and yet I dare say Mark would hate me as
> liaison for I find the changes in EL7 most refreshing and look forward
> to bring able to make better use of them in due course ;)
>
> But I really do question whether someone in this industry is really
> not able to spend 30 minutes or so every six months checking changes
> for anything interesting.
>
> And frankly if one isn't willing to get either get a subscription and
> feedback as a paying customer or to get involved with the upstream
> sources then no one does not have say in direction and one shouldn't
> be surprised by that.
>
> If it was a democracy with a vote on every possible choice then we'd
> never get anywhere given the time to carry out such a survey and the
> vast differences in opinions.
>
> No, as the Debian folks say it is a meritocracy instead and those
> who get stuck in and actively discuss at the right time provide
> the influence on what happens next.
>
Since the import of what I was trying to convey has been lost,  no
doubt due to my poor choice of words, I will restate the obvious: If
the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
distribution and RHEL will follow.  Talking about the server community
monitoring the Fedora development channel once every six months, or
every day for that matter, is simply not going to change this.

A handful of voices representing server installations, who by
definition are not development types, has no hope of dealing with the
incremental changes introduced every day by hundreds of people that
use laptops as their primary development platform and all of whom have
their own 'itch' to scratch.  That is just the way it is in open
source.  The choice to go to Fedora for RHEL development was a
commitment to the laptop environment, whether consciously made or not.
And it is not in the control of RH to dictate this.  If the Fedora
developers take up tablets en masse then guess what?: We will end up
with a tablet distribution.

The OS distro we get is the consequence of the culture and environment
predominant in the development community.  This is neither good nor
bad.  It just is.  Our firm has specific requirements which to date
have been more than adequately met by RHEL and CentOS.  But that seems
to us to be changing in ways that no longer meet our expectations from
a server based distro.

A server based distro to us has certain characteristics that are
orientated to long running processes and system uptimes measured in
months if not years.  I have given up counting how many times I have
to reboot all of our CentOS servers in the past year because of
updates.

On the other hand I have this task running on a different server with
a different OS:

   Priority = DS; Inpri = 8; Time = UNLIMITED seconds.
   Job number = #j3719.
   TUE, NOV  4, 2014,  2:04 PM.

We do not need plug-and-play; or usb hot-swapping; or hibernation; or
screen savers; or audio-video players; or power optimisation.  All of
which are worthy things in their own right and certainly have their
place in computing.  While these occasionally have proved convenient
for me none are really necessary for a server host and their presence
undoubtedly significantly increases the complexity and maintenance
burden of the distribution.

What we need is simplicity, stability, reliability, and consistency. 
What seems to be happening instead is feature-creep, software-bloat
and increased coupling.

And lest I be accused of 'wingeing' from the sideline I have been
contributing to Open Source in a modest way since 1995, starting with
Sendmail-8.7 on HP-UX.  I just have limited time to give over to these
things. The selection of RHEL for our primary platform was, in large
part, to reduce the resources given over to managing the software.  It
would be ironic in the extreme were the reverse prove the case.

-- 
***          e-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel          ***
        Do NOT transmit sensitive data via e-Mail
James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3C3

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 10:21:56AM -0500, James B. Byrne
wrote:
> Since the import of what I was trying to convey has been lost,  no
> doubt due to my poor choice of words, I will restate the obvious: If
> the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
> platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
> distribution and RHEL will follow.  Talking about the server community
> monitoring the Fedora development channel once every six months, or
> every day for that matter, is simply not going to change this.
But this isn't the case, so it's not really a very productive line of
speculation. We _have_ a server community around Fedora, both
developers and users.
> source.  The choice to go to Fedora for RHEL development was a
> commitment to the laptop environment, whether consciously made or not.
This does not match history nor the current situation.

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader

On 12/10/2015 07:21 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
> If the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their
> platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop
> distribution and RHEL will follow.
Surely you're not suggesting that the code a developer writes is 
dependent on the form factor of the computer on which they write it?  
I'm sure that idea would shock nearly all of the developers of software 
for both rack mounted servers and embedded devices.

I think it's likely that, instead, you believe that you are 
representative of all of the people who do your job, and that features 
which you do not need are therefore not needed by others. That logic is 
quite normal, but completely wrong.

Take for instance your opinion of power management for NICs.  While 
power management is important to mobile, battery-operated devices, it is 
also desirable in large data centers.  Cooling and power use are big 
issues for data centers, and that feature was intended for that 
environment.  You dismiss it as laptop-oriented technology, but not all 
system administrators do.
> A handful of voices representing server installations, who by
> definition are not development types
"By definition?"  Have you heard of DevOps?  Whatever your opinion of 
that idea, there are definitely server admins who take part in 
development at all levels of the stack.
> A server based distro to us has certain characteristics that are
> orientated to long running processes and system uptimes measured in
> months if not years.  I have given up counting how many times I have
> to reboot all of our CentOS servers in the past year because of
> updates.
I share that frustration, but it has nothing to do with whether or not 
Fedora developers use laptops.  The truth is simply that software 
becomes more complex over time, that there is a growing value in 
attacking computer systems, and that the world is increasingly 
connected.  These things act together to create a situation where bugs 
are more likely in the core components, where it's harder to update a 
system without fully rebooting it.

But there's hope. There are a number of efforts to produce a system to 
update the kernel without reboots (ksplice, kgraft, kpatch, and 
KernelCare).  More developers are writing unit tests.  Code analysis 
tools are improving.  Both the number of bugs produced and the cost of 
fixing them are getting better over time, too.
> We do not need plug-and-play; or usb hot-swapping; or hibernation; or
> screen savers; or audio-video players; or power optimisation.
That's great for you, but some of those things are really valuable for 
system admins, especially those who run *really large* numbers of 
systems.  Power and cooling cost money, so optimization has a lot of 
value.  A lot of those plug-and-play and hot-swapping technologies that 
you deride are essential for high availability systems (such as SAS/SATA 
hot swapping).

Gordon Messmer wrote:
> I think it's likely that, instead, you believe that you are
> representative of all of the people who do your job, and that features
> which you do not need are therefore not needed by others. That logic is
> quite normal, but completely wrong.
On the other hand, it would be relatively easy to determine
the number of CentOS users, or CentOS machines, in various categories.
For some reason both CentOS and Fedora seem to shy away from gathering
this kind of information, or indeed any information from users.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin