On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 09:44:51AM -0600, Robbie Williamson wrote: > Am I wrong, or did Dell request that we enable this feature by default > for Dell Poweredge servers *only*, by detecting at boot...and that > they had done something similar with Fedora?
I thought I covered that in my original mail: "Firstly, I think it is in general unwise to make this kind of change for a single class of machine, at least for Ubuntu itself as opposed to vendor-specific builds. The effect of doing that is to divide our testing efforts, so that tests of relevant functionality on one class of machine can no longer be presumed to be valid for others. This usually ends up being to the detriment of everyone: Dell servers would no longer be able to take advantage of the testing we do on other classes of system." Now, I can see that to some extent this is the server team's problem rather than mine, so if you're saying that the server team is willing to take this on and fix the associated foundational issues that our networking expert has said it's likely to trigger, then I guess that's fine. I just find it a slightly disturbing precedent, and it would be very easy to end up with a distribution whose behaviour was in practice fragmented across systems. Furthermore, it may be that Dell requested that Fedora enable this only for PowerEdge servers, but that's not what they appear to have actually implemented. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ConsistentNetworkDeviceNaming (owned by a Dell engineer) says: "This feature affects all physical systems that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later (specifically field types 9 and 41). Dell PowerEdge 10G and newer servers (PowerEdge 1950 III family, PowerEdge R710 family, and newer), and HP ProLiant G6 servers and newer are known to expose this information, as do some newer desktop models. Furthermore, most older systems expose some information in the PCI IRQ Routing Table, which will be consulted if information is not provided by SMBIOS." So, without being yet decided about biosdevname by default, I'm wholeheartedly in agreement with Fedora that it should be all or nothing if we don't want to risk lowering the quality of Ubuntu just on PowerEdge servers, which I'm sure isn't the goal. > If we can contain this change to only affecting Dell servers, then any > issues it creates would also only affect Dell servers...and I'd think > Dell would have a self-interest in helping us resolve those asap. On the other hand, the people who will end up being responsible for fixing the bugs may not have desperately convenient access to Dell servers. By making this behaviour system-specific, we make it harder for our own developers to track down obscure corner cases. Personally, my preferred approach would be something like this: 1) Come up with a QA plan for 12.04 involving installing a cohort of test systems with biosdevname=1 and tracking down the associated problems. That would permit Dell and others to use this in deployments, without risking the quality of the golden 12.04 images. (The above Fedora specification should help, since it links to a number of application-specific bug reports.) 2) At UDS, consider defaulting to biosdevname=1 for 12.10. Presumably by that point we would have reasonably substantial experience with it as a result of 1). Cheers, -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@ubuntu.com] -- ubuntu-devel mailing list ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
