[Mageia-dev] kernel 3.0 is a big mistake in cauldron

Radu-Cristian FOTESCU beranger5ca at yahoo.ca
Sun Jul 17 16:37:26 CEST 2011


>and both i586 and x86_64 kernels were tested on a i7-860 workstation and 
>on a Acer TravelMate 5720  laptop before submitting to the buildsystem...


tmb, for the Wi-Fi issue, I identified the culprit.

With the 2.6.38 kernel, dkms-broadcom-wl was useless (Broadcom STA

is a hybrid driver, including a binary blob from upstream, but in Mageia 

dkms-broadcom-wl is not like Ubuntu's broadcom-wl, it still asks for
firmware, which is stupid, as STA is redistributable; eventually, I had to use 

fw-cutter and to populate /lib/firmware/b43 with *.fw, so that BCM4311 rev.1
works w/o dkms-broadcom-wl!).

With the 3.0.0 kernel, dkms-broadcom-wl tries to build a module after booting,
but it doesn't work at all (I haven't checked what it does, whether it has the binary 

blob or not, if it logs messages, etc.), and it blocks b43. 

Uninstalling dkms-broadcom-wl still didn't fix the issue, but again, I have not investigated
-- maybe there are some remnants or smth that impedes b43.

Still, with the 3.0.0 kernel, my TravelMate 5310 fails to shutdown or reboot, when told
so kdeinit4 takes 100% CPU and the system becomes unresponsive. Back to 2.6.38,
everything is smooth again.

Experimenting with various packages and their breakages is one thing, but the Linux
kernel is my personal enemy, I hate the too many changes between one release and 

the next one, it's practically impossible to design & run any relevant regression tests. 

If I were in charge with any distro's policy, I would be particularly conservative
when comes to the kernel (e.g. slackware-current is still on 2.6.38.7)

>There is no forcing...
>the old kernel is still installed so you can use it if you need.

>
>And if you dont like automatic kernel upgrades, uninstall kernel-*-latest


I did so, but w/o kernel-*-latest I suppose I won't get any kernel update at all?!
This is not what I intended...


>its always good to know my work is appreciated...


Your work in patching and packing and so on is one thing, and the policy of
when the kernel goes and where it goes and what kind of kernel-*-latest 

metapackages exist is a different thing. I still believe that, even in cauldron,
there should be 2 distinct kernel "branches", not a unique kernel-*-latest path.
(Maybe I'm influenced by the conservative way Slackware is approaching the kernels.)
(Or maybe I'm just getting old.)

R-C aka beranger



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