[3704] in Release_7.7_team
VMWare problem in Athena release! How many of your systems use
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Jan 17 16:20:34 2003
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Chris Terman <cjt@lcs.MIT.EDU>
Cc: release-team@mit.edu
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Date: 17 Jan 2003 16:20:28 -0500
Message-Id: <1042838428.13934.20.camel@tokata.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Chris:
In testing a patch release that contains some goodies that help Athena
act nicer on Laptops in a sometimes-disconnected-from-the-net use, we've
discovered a problem:
The current kernel that Red Hat ships (that we try and standardize on)
has problems with VMWare.
We don't run VMWare in-house, so the current Athena already has an
inconvenient problem: The 2.4.18-17 kernel we have already deployed
sufferes from Red Hat bugzilla bug ID 78758. VMWare crashes with fatal
vmware-error when you try to "power down" the virtual machine. This
problem apparently does not occur in the "now considered obsolete"
2.4.18-5 kernel.
The 2.4.18-18 kernel that we were just about to release in our patch
breaks VMWare severely. Bridged networking quit working. You can
communicate betweenthe host and guest OS, but the guest OS cannot
communicate to anyone else on the network.
At this moment we are testing 2.4.18-19, but since the bug is still
open, and since Red Hat seems to be taking the position, "This is a
problem that must be fixed on the VMWare side.", we're expecting this is
going to still be broken.
QUESTIONS:
1. How many systems will be affected here?
We DO have the provision to lock those systems into a particular kernel
revision, (and its matching AFS revision).
2. What, from your vantage point, is the right thing to do here?
-wdc
