Re: Raid 0 to 5

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> A == A V Le Blanc <LeBlanc [at] mcc.ac.uk> writes:

>> On 03-Sep-99 Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>>> I think this trend of the various distributions toward
>>> bloating kernels through feeping creaturitis is a bad idea....

A> This is a bit unfair. The problem is, the distribution kernel
A> has to work on more-or-less all systems.

True. I don't know anybody whose first system had a RAID, though. I
see that as a 6-sigma outlier. I find it hard to imagine the user
profile who would be starting with a RAID system, and get stopped by
lack of a kernel with MD ....

Note I don't object to fancy modules. Distributions should come with
a nice big collection of these. (Users who modprobe without knowing
what they're doing deserve what they get, to a great extent.) But
things that are _built in_ to distribution kernels should be
bulletproof and secure to the extent possible. I could see MD as an
exception, MD (RAID-0 and RAID-1) has been stock for a while, but the
new RAID patch (supporting levels 4 and 5) is described by Debian as
alpha, you have been warned.

And why is all the firewalling and masquerading stuff getting built
in? That stuff does not affect the ability to upgrade a system at
all, and is the source of a lot of pain for new users. IPv6: totally
irrelevant as yet.

A> I, for example, have a system whose filestore is (except for /
A> and /var partitions) on a multiple device, which speeds up
A> performance significantly. If they didn't include md in the
A> standard kernel, I couldn't upgrade the machine out-of-the-box.

I'm confused. I never use the kernel in the box in an upgrade, I've
always got a newer kernel whose bugs I know. With the two exceptions
of starting on a new machine, or beta testing a distribution.

Are there really distributions that force you to _install_ the kernel
in the box for an upgrade?[1] With the single exception of a massively
incompatible libc upgrade (a.out -> ELF, HJ Liu -> glibc), I don't see
the need. Even there, for the libc5 -> libc6 transition there was a
script to do it on a running system under Debian.

Footnotes:
[1] Of course, they can't. I've rebuilt kernels and initrds on
install floppies so that I could install buggy betas. Admittedly
that's far beyond what anybody should be expected to do to be able to
use the kernel of their choice. :-)

--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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