Re: FreeBSD Errata Notice FreeBSD-EN-23:16.openzfs

On Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 8:32 AM Tomoaki AOKI <junchoon@dec.sakura.ne.jp>
wrote:

> On Mon, 04 Dec 2023 08:48:52 -0500
> Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-stable-local@be-well.ilk.org> wrote:
>
> > Kurt Jaeger <pi@freebsd.org> writes:
> >
> > > I had thought that the ZFS fix is a kernel fix so that the kernel
> > > would also report -p1, but it does not. It might be because
> > > zfs is a kernel module, so the kernel itself was not really patched,
> > > but I might be wrong here.
> >
> > As far as I can see, that seems exactly right.
>
> As this kind of confusion caused by mismatch of patchlevel between
> kernel and userland arises from time to time, now would be the time to
> switch to keep patchlevel in sync between kernel and userland.
>
> This would force both kernel and userland to be built using the same
> patchlevel, even if one of which is actually unchanged.
> But maybe helpful to avoid confusion like this.
>
> What was worse this time was that a non-in-kernel-but-in-tree module,
> zfs.ko, is updated but kernel itself is not updated.


Part of this is because freebsd-update generally wants to exclude cosmetic
changes (like build timestamps, etc., which does not have an effect on
runtime behavior) in binary patches, so in order to "fix" this we would
need to change the update builder, at the expense of always delivering a
kernel change regardless if there are any real changes to the binary.  At
the time when I owned the builder code, the consensus was that we are
moving to a packaged base really soon (tm) and the builder is in
"maintenance mode" so we didn't invest a lot in this front.

Cheers,