Dev log for 3.9.2

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@kupan787 Hello again

@kupan787

I like to keep my systems up to date (bug fixes, security, etc),

I can address this one:

All updates bar those of the rockstor package, the kernel, and btrfs-progs can be installed on either stable or testing channel at any time via the flashing icon to the left of the kernel version number (top right):

And given our kernels are unmodified elrepo-ml you have the option of adding this repo (via their instructions) to gain their updates as they come out or, as @jim.allum recently posted howto indicates:

Upgrading to latest elrepo kernel - kernel-ml-4.15.0-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64.rpm

I experienced a kernel panic with stable kernel update 4.12.4-1.e17.elrepo.x86_64 from 4.10.6-1, running under hyper-v, not long after boot. This appeared to happen after the Resilio rock-on started to sync, although I do not think this is related to the rock-on and may be an IPV6 problem in the kernel from what I have read elsewhere. You can see full details of this original problem at: I decided to upgrade the kernel to the latest stable elrepo kernel kernel-ml-4.15.0-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64.rp…

to a specific version, until our next matching release of kernel and btrfs-progs is release. This is safer option as you are a little less ‘out on your own’.

Also see @suman’s recent post re kernel update:

What to do about Meltdown and Spectre

I’ve gotten a few e-mails about Rockstor updates to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre. I want to start this post as a one stop reference for our community. It seems like there are going to be multiple patches to address these issues. Since we don’t use upstream(CentOS) kernel, we can’t just rely on updates from them. We use more recent mainline kernels compiled with same config as upstream, provided by the elrepo project. So the fix for Rockstor systems will be to update to an appropriate kernel f…

Also all code is open-source and can be built from the GitHub repo via the instructions within the Developers section. Although this is non-trivial and there exists a caveat via an outstanding @Flyer pr:

Disabling gulp on Rockstor buildout

which is trivial to apply. But note you may loose all settings / db entries so be careful on that front.

@kupan787

testing channel is being killed in favor of a paid only subscription,

The plan is to transition the ‘testing channel’ away from an rpm based update to one where you can use the code published on GitHub the minute it is available. Ie as it’s merged it will be possible to initiate a rebuild directly from that code. This will server development better as there will be less delay to each testing release and less overhead to managing 2 seperate rpm update trains. So hopefully a win win, earlier and quicker updates as soon as is possible, for those who are happy with this more edgy approach, and more developer time spend on developing rather than rpm release management.

But unfortunately this is all taking longer than anticipated and is frustrating all round so please be patient as these things are always a little more involved than at first they appear. But the intention is to maintain a “value add” (probably stability/convenience based) to those on the paid subscription as that is an important element of Rockstor’s sustainability, along with Incident-Based support of course. Without these elements we could end up being another OpenFiler.

Note also that all updates to the Rockstor package in the stable channel subscription since latest testing release have been convenience and bug fix related. No security related fixes have been committed.

Hope that helps and let us know how you get on with that update everything else button provided by @Flyer, it is in keeping with all his other contributions, quite fancy: see also pincards password recovery system.