CentOS - Jul 2010 - OT: ?? Centos Still Broken, Red Hat won't fix ??

To the Linux Community at Large:

I reported to this list back in January, 2010 that the standard x86_64 
kernel, when built from the src.rpm and modified for AMD K8 / K10 
Extensions would not build. I reported this here and to Red Hat via 
Bugzilla ID number 558367. RH AS / Centos 5.3 worked fine. That was 
Centos 5.4 / Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 Update 4. Today we tried to 
optimize Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 Update 5. Same problem. At last check 
all kernels from 2.6.18-10 to 2.6.18-194 won't build with AMD specific 
optimizations.

For 9 years now we have used and supported Centos and before that white 
box. We have sold, installed and provided consulting on Red Hat Linux 
and RH Enterprise Linux, Centos, Scientific Linux, OpenSUSE and SUSE 
Linux Enterprise.

In April this year, the bug was still marked as new and we had to 
recommend to a customer to use SUSE Linux Enterprise instead of Red Hat 
Enterprise, as Novell's product supports optimizations in its kernel for 
AMD Opterons. 12 SLES Enterprise copies were sold to the customer. I'm 
sure that would have easily paid for the fix required in Redhat's kernel.

I am beginning to wonder if Red Hat is getting too big? Or that it just 
does not care. Other ideas less pleasant come to mind....  Today, the 
old bug was still marked as new (6+ months and counting). I entered a 
new bug report for RH 5.5 for the same issue. Is there no way, unless 
you are a huge customer, to get your bug listed as anything except LOW 
PRIORITY??

Now we are looking at the AMD G34 CPU's and are building some demo 
units. I think its time to benchmark these systems with the working - 
non optimized Red Hat / Centos Linux versus the optimized Opensuse / 
SLES Linux for standard server functions and publish them.

Has anyone else had this NON response from Red Hat for similar issues? 
I'd like to hear from them.

Thanks for reading....
-- 
Seth Bardash

Integrated Solutions and Systems LLC

719-495-5866   Shop Phone
719-337-4779   Cell

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

On Thu, 8 Jul 2010 at 3:39pm, Seth Bardash wrote
> I am beginning to wonder if Red Hat is getting too big? Or that it just
> does not care. Other ideas less pleasant come to mind....  Today, the
> old bug was still marked as new (6+ months and counting). I entered a
> new bug report for RH 5.5 for the same issue. Is there no way, unless
> you are a huge customer, to get your bug listed as anything except LOW
> PRIORITY??
It has been stated many times and on many fora that Red Hat's bugzilla is 
not a mechanism for support.  They are under no obligation to address 
issues raised there.  Is it nice when they do?  Absolutely.  Should you 
expect (nay, demand) it?  Nope.  The proper way to get Red Hat to address 
an issue is to open a ticket via your support contract with them.
> Now we are looking at the AMD G34 CPU's and are building some demo
> units. I think its time to benchmark these systems with the working -
> non optimized Red Hat / Centos Linux versus the optimized Opensuse /
> SLES Linux for standard server functions and publish them.
While that may be interesting to compare distributions, I think it would 
do little to evaluate the benefit of the kernel CPU optimizations.  There 
are just too many other variables.  I would be very interested to see 
numbers comparing the exact same Red Hat distribution benchmarked with and 
without the kernel optimizations (you said 5.3 worked just fine).  Do you 
have previous numbers on that showing a marked benefit?

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF

On 07/08/10 2:39 PM, Seth Bardash wrote:
> To the Linux Community at Large:
>
> I reported to this list back in January, 2010 that the standard x86_64
> kernel, when built from the src.rpm and modified for ...
I don't understand how you think that this is a bug.  you modified 
something and it broke.   the provided redhat binary kernels work fine 
as advertised.

On Thursday 08 July 2010, Seth Bardash wrote:
> To the Linux Community at Large:
>
> I reported to this list back in January, 2010 that the standard x86_64
> kernel, when built from the src.rpm and modified for AMD K8 / K10
> Extensions would not build. I reported this here and to Red Hat via
> Bugzilla ID number 558367. RH AS / Centos 5.3 worked fine. That was
> Centos 5.4 / Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 Update 4. Today we tried to
> optimize Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 Update 5. Same problem. At last check
> all kernels from 2.6.18-10 to 2.6.18-194 won't build with AMD specific
> optimizations.
Do you have any data to back up this position? (that optimizing the kernel for 
a specific processor is of any significant real world use)

...
> Now we are looking at the AMD G34 CPU's and are building some demo
> units. I think its time to benchmark these systems with the working -
> non optimized Red Hat / Centos Linux versus the optimized Opensuse /
> SLES Linux for standard server functions and publish them.
Too many (other) variables change you'd not be able to say that it had to do
with the processor specific optimization of the kernel.

For this you'd need to benchmark the same dist but with optimized and 
non-optimized kernel.

Also, to impress me, the benchmark in question would have to be a relevant 
high level benchmark, not kernel micro benchmarks.

/Peter
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