So, me fighting irq kernel bug (see my previous post). I went to kernel.org, got a stock kernel, build it, tried to install :

/sbin/depmod -e -F System.map 2.6.17.8
WARNING: Module /lib/modules/2.6.17.8/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_DSCP.ko is not an elf object
…. some stuff skipped ….
Segmentation fault

Nice!

Apearantly, depmod segfaults after looking at /lib/modules/$kernel_verion/updates

strace output:

open(“/lib/modules/2.6.17.8/updates”, O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
— SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) —
+++ killed by SIGSEGV +++

Maybe it will be fixed or maybe I will write a patch for this

I encuntered an annoying bug after I upgraded from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5. The result of this bug is that after X server restart or switching to a console or after suspend-resume USB, Sound and Network does not work any more. It happens because kernel disables IRQ that mentioned hardware uses to get CPU’s attention. Hopes that it will be fixed soon.

Lets analize it a bit further. Here are the screen shots of that page opened in Opera and MS IE 6.0 and the third screen shot shows CPU load that Opera and IE take to display that page.
(for IE, look at ‘wine-preloader’ process, because I have IE running under wine on Linux.)

MS IE 6.0

Opera 8.0

CPU Load

Lets now open this page in Firefox and see what would happen with CPU load. (note: there are 2 screen shots, the second one with only FireFox running.)

Page in FF

CPU load for FF

CPU Load for FF (other apps closed)

I took output of strace for all 3 browsers. Looks like all 3 are doing the same things, but FF does not do “the right thing” !

And by the way, that page is “great” peice web desing from IBM … clearly , they checked it only for IE …. You can the JavaScript code resposible for the mess here.

Hope that helps!

Added: I filed a for bug this with mozilla.

Impressions: I would call it Fedora 3.5, not Fedora 4… It has many upgraded applications, most noticeable would be Gnome 2.10 and OpenOffice 2.0. With OpenOffice I had an issue: I was running a 2.0 version of OpenOffice already, but when I fired up version shipped with FC4 I discovered that OpenOffice Base lacked 2 pretty important database drives: JDBC and SDBS. (and maybe other too, I didn’t check). So, if anyone needs a database connectivity from OpenOffice, please uninstall Fedora OpenOffice packages. (you do with one line of code sudo nice -n -19 rpm -e $(rpm -qa | grep openoffice)). Then go OpenOffice 2.0 Download page and grab the current build and rpm -Uvh it.

For desktop use I run custom kernels with improved-responsiveness patches from Con Kolivas, so I cannot really tell you what was changed in Fedora kernel since the latest FC3 kernel release.

By the way, I discovered a segfault bug in vmstat utility. You can reproduce this bug by trying to check block IO on any LVM-based partition.

vmstat -p /dev/VolumeGroup/LogicalVolume

Other than that everything looks fine. Thank you Fedora!

PS: I’m writing this after I came back from a presentation that Warren Togami (the guy who actually started Fedora project in the first place ) gave at US LUG (USC = University of Southern California, LUG = Linux Users Groups). It was actually a very nice presentation, at the end some people got cool little things from RedHat, including RedHat-branded bottles of water with a sign “Free as in Water” and one lucky guy got theat famost red hat! . Thank you Warren and Thank you Red Hat!