[3228] in Release_7.7_team
Draft announcement to release-announce w.r.t. 2.4.9-31
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Apr 3 18:54:03 2002
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
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Date: 03 Apr 2002 18:54:00 -0500
Message-Id: <1017878040.23144.65.camel@tokata.mit.edu>
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Here is what I propose to send to Release Announce:
Is it too verbose?
Does it strike the right balance?
What needs to be added/deleted/changed?
-wdc
----
Subj: Serious but extremely rare problem with Athena 9.0.25 and higher.
Summary:
On an extremely few systems, the kernel that Red Hat shipped out and
which Athena standardized upon hangs after displaying:
Uncompressing Linux ... Ok, booting the kernel.
If this should happen to you with Linux Athena, email wdc, and either I
or someone who works for me will come out and get you back in business.
If you have a large installation of identical hardware, you should
already be putting one of those systems into the beta cluster to get
early Athena updates to detect problems, so that issues like this don't
take out your whole site.
Detail:
As Linux Athena shifts to providing support to a diversity of hardware
alerts like this one may become more frequent.
Shortly after deploying the Athena update with the version 2.4.9-31
Linux Kernel from Red Hat, we got a report from the field that their
machine took the update and then hung.
Andrew Boardman and I visited the system ourselves, and sure enough, the
kernel begins to start up and displays:
Uncompressing Linux ... Ok, booting the kernel.
and then hangs.
We discovered that this problem has been reported by someone else to Red
Hat: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61340
My guess is that this problem will stump Red Hat, and that the fix will
come when the next officially blessed kernel from Red Hat comes out
fails to reproduce the problem. Until then, the problem has been shown
to be exceedingly rare.
I've seen it on HP Vectra VEi8 hardware.
The Athena UNIX Platform Team and Red Hat work very hard to try and
prevent these sorts of problems from ever being seen in the field. But
with the extreme diversity of hardware, untried combinations are
inevitable.
If you have a large number of systems at your site, DEFINITELY put one
in the Beta cluster to act as a final check on problems with updates
before your whole site gets bit by a bug unique to your configuration.
We apologize for the inconvenience. And hope that this information is
useful to you. We continue to monitor the situation, and will deploy a
fix as soon as one becomes available. In the meantime, the number of
affected systems is expected to be so few, and the procedure to recover
so obscure, that I've personally volunteered to make any required site
visits.
Thank you for using Athena Linux.
-Bill Cattey
Team Leader
Athena UNIX Platform Team
