Quality management critical software

[marlemion]

Hi,

I am relativly new to the forum and to ARM Arch, too. Recently, I have switched my parents NSA310 to use arch. Managed even to get the kirkwood-dt kernel booting on it, so I am very happy atm.

However, there have been three (3!) cases, where I updated the system and it turned out to be not reachable anymore.

1) Upon a restart, the network didn't come up anymore. Reason was that the external usb drive couldn't be mounted anymore, so systemd refused to start the network (don't ask me why). Reason for the mount failure was a mount option in fstab, which hasn't been placed there by myself as far as I can remember. Anyhow, granted, it could be my fault. Anyway, strange.

2) After a kernel update, the network did not come up anymore. See: viewtopic.php?f=53&t=8745

3) After a systemd update the network did not come up anymore. See: viewtopic.php?f=58&t=8760

So in all of these cases I had to grab out my serial cable, unassemble the unit, use my laptop to understand the failure, get packages from rollback, use an usb stick to get the packages on the unit, rollback the packages and restart. From an administrative point of view, this is horrible. The unit is placed at my parents home and I normally administrate it via ssh. So, if the network does not come up, I am screwed.

Currently, the respective packages are masked so that they won't be updated by pacman. However, I wondered if there is any quality management going on before these packages are supplied. I especially wonder as my x86 arch still ships with 2.18 systemd and 3.19 kernel. So there must be reasons for that.

[WarheadsSE]

My desktop Arch is 219-5
Also, we've not seen the kernel cause the NIC to drop out.

[marlemion]

Right, it is 2.19-5 on my system, too, my apologies.

Does arch provide a stable/testing environment like gentoo?

[WarheadsSE]

Upstream Arch does. At this point, ALARM does not do so.

We're investigating the requirements and overhead (remember we're a very small team).

This is a change in the kernel that broke a few things, like PCI on the kirkwoods, that we've reported to the kernel devs.

[marlemion]

Well, I know that you are a small team and thus your work is even more terrific. I could also keep the respective pckages masked and update them only in case I am able to debug the situation when I am home.

Anyway. Thanks for your clarifications!

[marlemion]

Will the 2.19-5.1 version of sstemd resolve this issue?

I reckoned that this patch has been applied:

https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUIL ... c427.patch

[moonman]

This patch is reversed, and yes it fixes the problem.

[bodhi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('WarheadsSE', '
')This is a change in the kernel that broke a few things, like PCI on the kirkwoods, that we've reported to the kernel devs.