Greetings,

On 07/29/2016 10:42 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> There being so many repositories with "sub-repositories" that I do not
> keep track of many; however, yumex reveals many of these. For ELRepo,
> there is an EL7 community kernel repository.  Is anyone using this for
> production machines  (presumably, yes)?

On a limited number of production machines yes. I guess I should really
classify these as "production but we expect them to break" machines.
Why? Because we are crazy enough to run CephFS in "production" on SL6 (I
know. We are a bit nutz on this project but it works really well!! o_O)
which requires the newer kernels.


> If so, how do these differ from
> the "stock" SL (CentOS, RHEL, ...) kernels?

The kernel names are actually different. kernel vs kernel-ml. Obviously,
you get a lot of the perks of newer kernels, but you get occasional
weird issues because some "stock" kernel modules/packages/ect expect the
old kernel. So far these have all been incredibly trivial/minor for us.

Also, if you keep both you will probably run into issues where one
kernel (usually the stock kernel) updates something with the headers or
glibc or something important and just smashes everything you have
forcing itself to be the primary new kernel. On reboot, you find that it
is all borked up and you have to go back to an older kernel/recovery
mode to figure out what got smashed in the update.

Personally, I have had it with that. I strip out the old kernel
completely and just run on the ELRepo kernel/debug/header/ect packages.

> If one uses an ELRepo
> kernel, and one then does a minor release upgrade of SL (assuming yum
> upgrade or something similar actually works, not requiring smashing the
> system partitions), will the ELRepo kernel "parts" play nicely with such
> a SL upgrade, or are there conflicts resulting in either no-boot (system
> failure) or instabilities?

As long as it isn't updating the kernel (previously mentioned issues), I
have had no issues going from 6.6 to 6.7 to 6.8.

> For "new" laptops/tablets that do not have
> the necessary drivers in stock SL, does the ELRepo kernel repository
> provide additional current drivers (as might be present in Ubuntu or
> even fully enthusiast, not enterprise production, Linux distros)?

Yup! At least in my very limited testing. I only care about a few very
specific parts of the hardware driver updates + CephFS. I really haven't
tested much further then that.

Good luck!
~S~