Release Engineering Status Report

[Erik Trulsson]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 10:30:50AM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> Mike Silbersack wrote:
> >On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Scott Long wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Patches have been floated on the mailing list that revert PAE in its
> >>various stages.  Maybe those need to be brought back up.  Silby?  Tor?
> >>
> >>Scott
> >
> >
> >I believe that Tor's commit on August 30th resolved the PAE-related
> >problems, so there is no need for a reversion.  Since that time, I've seen
> >three panics posted:
> >
> >1.  Some netinet/ related panic which I couldn't make heads or tails of,
> >and I haven't any followup reports from the poster.
> >
> >2.  Maxim's buildworld -j64 memory kmap entry exhaustion panic, which can
> >be fixed by increasing the number of kmap entries.  (Tor has a patch for
> >this, I will probably commit it soon.)
> >
> >3.  A panic caused by sending 64K-1 ping packets, which I can't reproduce.
> >
> >(There's also a small problem with if_xl on pentium-1 machines, but since
> >it's my fault and I'm waiting on test results from a guy, we won't talk
> >about it.)
> >
> >(Hey, anyone have a pentium-200 and a 3com 905B card?  Contact me, further
> >testing can't hurt.)
> >
> >So, as far as I can tell, there are no remaining problems related to PAE;
> >I believe that most people are venting frustration that built up between
> >August 9th and 30th.
> >
> >Mike "Silby" Silbersack
> >
> 
> Ok, thanks for the update.  Since it is 17 days after Aug 30 and people
> are still upset, the status was very unclear to the Release Engineering
> Team.  So I guess we ened to solicit updates from the people who were
> directly experiencing problems, and ask for everyone else to test it as
> much as possible.

I was one the people who were experiencing stability problems after the
PAE commit.  I had several unexpected panics and could provoke panics
nearly at will on systems that had previously been rock-stable.
After the Aug 30 commit I have not had any panics at all and I have not
experienced any other stability problems either since then.

In my personal experience RELENG_4 is currently quite stable (not
counting any commits made during the last 48 hours or so since I have
not yet tested any of those), but it is of course possible that other
people have run into bugs in components of the kernel that I don't use.


(Note: I do not have PAE enabled in the kernel.  I have no idea what
the situation is for those who actually have enabled PAE, but any
problems that may exist there is non-critical IMO since they would not
affect any pre-existing configurations.)


-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se