FC2 kernel quality

Enrico Scholz enrico.scholz at informatik.tu-chemnitz.de
Thu Sep 30 18:16:30 UTC 2004


Hello,

I am a little bit concerned about the quality of the FC2 errata-kernels. They
have several bugs which make them nearly unusable:

* cdrecording is completely broken:
  - 'cdrecord' refuses to work as non-root which breaks nearly every GUI
  - there is a severe memory-leak in the kernel when burning audio-CDs

* there is a bug when opening new PTYs; a symptom is EIO when accessing
  /dev/ptmx. This bug breaks application like screen or ssh.

* SELinux can not load the policies anymore because the tools can not
  handle SELinux versions above 17 but the kernel has 18


The first two issues are well known for more than 1 month and are
critical (cd-burning is a common action, and who can live without
ssh?). The SELinux thing should be solved also because SELinux was
titled as a killer-feature of FC2.

Can we expect a fixed version in the near feature, or shall we go back
to the vanilla kernel and fix the bugs manually?



Another issue might be the kernel packaging which is very inefficient.
There is no reason to include the kernel-sources/headers in the base
'kernel' package, because:

* it wastes 20-30MB of diskspace and 6000 inodes on the root-filesystem
* there is no way to prevent this e.g. with %_netsharedpath
* it makes cross-compiling of kernel-modules impossible (e.g. you can
  not build i686 modules on an i586 because you can not install the i686
  kernel)
* it is incomplete: the kernel-headers alone are useless so at least a
  'Requires: cpp' would be needed in the kernel package. But minimal
  systems need the kernel only but not cpp.

A possible solution would be the creation of a separate subpackage with
the kernel-headers. These are to be installed either directly at
/lib/modules/.../build, or (preferred) under /usr/src, /usr/share/... or
... and make /lib/modules/.../build a symlink to this place.




Enrico




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