Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] KS Topic request: Handling the Stablekernel, let's dump the cc: stable tag

From: Ben Hutchings
Date: Tue Jul 16 2013 - 08:43:55 EST


On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 11:46 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Jul 2013, James Bottomley wrote:
>
> > > But I need, from the distros, specific examples of what they object to.
> > > So far all I've gotten is one security patch (that was needed), and one
> > > patch for sysfs that I backported too far in the version numbers (my
> > > fault.)
> > >
> > > Given the huge number of stable patches over the past few years, only
> > > having 2 patches be an issue sounds like things are working well for
> > > people here.
> > >
> > > If I don't get pushback, with specifics, from the distros, I will not
> > > know what to change, so if people can provide me that, it will help out
> > > a lot.
> >
> > I agree ... I think JiÅÃ and his Red Hat equivalent need to pipe up and
> > give us more examples of the problems they've been having.
>
> I am still continuing with my pushback against the /dev/random revamp that
> happened in -stable; at least in the form it happened. I still strongly
> believe it's something that's not a stable material. But that's happening
> in parallel in a different thread already.
>
> Okay, if you want another example:
>
> commit a6aa749906b92eaec6ca0469f90f35de26044d90
> Author: Zhenzhong Duan <zhenzhong.duan@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Thu Dec 20 15:05:14 2012 -0800
>
> drivers/firmware/dmi_scan.c: fetch dmi version from SMBIOS if it exists
>
> While this is a correct fix for major kernel release, as it achieves
> correctness by checking SMBIOS version properly and behaving according to
> the spec, it actually causes an userspace ABI regression in some sense, as
> it just changes byte order of /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid on certain
> systems.
[...]

It wasn't even a correct fix, as it caused the DMI header to be detected
in the wrong place on some machines.

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
Humans are not rational beings; they are rationalising beings.

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