[WBEL-devel] Questions RE WhiteBox Linux..

[John A. Tamplin]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Scott W wrote:

> First, I want to say thanks and good job- RedHat's been driving me 
> insane with their pricing and 'strategy' since they dropped the 
> PowerTools CD...and it's pretty unlikely many people have the ~$1500 or 
> so for the ES/AS line unless they have it at work.  I've thought about 
> trying to compile RHAS from source several times,

ES isn't $1500 -- it is $349 for the download version, and half that if 
you already have an RHN account from their migration promotion.  Since WS 
includes httpd and samba, most 1-2 CPU machines with <=8G RAM only need 
WS, which is $179/$90 for basic support.  I don't think it is an 
unreasonable price, and if your organization pays for support contracts 
already that is a drop in the bucket.  Granted, it cuts out the SOHO 
customers and developers (although RH is about to make RHEL free for 
developers), but that is the reason WBEL exists.  Also, their pricing is 
less reasonable for AMD64 and I2, but right now those are small enough it 
doesn't much matter.

> 1.  RedHat seems to have butchered the kernel pretty badly for the AS/ES 
> series, intermingling some of their in-house drivers with the standard 
> kernel tree (tried forever unsuccessfully to rebuild taroon's kernel 
> without RH QLA2200 support, using the native driver only, among other 
> problems).  I guess the concern is this- AFAIK, WhiteBox is running a 
> 'standard' kernel from kernel.org or from RH9.  With AS/ES being 
> 'certified' for use with Oracle and other big name software, what are 
> the chances of RH's 'tweaked' kernel solving problems (performance or 
> other) that the standard kernel branche, and thus WBL, don't?  In other 
> words, how closely is WBL going to attempt to track RH*S changes and 
> tweaks so users can still run 'RH*S certified) apps without issues?

WBEL uses the RHEL kernel.  The RHEL kernel mods are primarily performance 
oriented rather than correctness.  Ie, SMP scheduling, SCSI subsystem, and 
async I/O -- largely driven by Oracle.  They do actually make a 
significant improvement on big SMP machines with FC disk arrays.  Oracle 
runs just fine on the standard kernel, just slower.

What problem did you have building the qla2200 driver?  It is a module, so
you just build the new module and install it (fixing the name in the
Makefile so it has the right kernel version).  In fact, I recently
switched back to the RH qla2300 driver rather than the one certified by
EMC at work because it works just as well and avoids the hassle of
rebuilding it with each new kernel version.

> 2.  Updates- Another obnoxiousness from RH- AFAIK, unregistered RH*S 
> users are unable to use up2date without purchasing a support agreement.  
> Are there any plans in place to provide a means to perhaps use up2date 
> with a 3rd party server, mirroring the RH*S fixes?

The WBEL up2date is the one from Fedora, so it understands apt and yum 
repositories.  You can already run up2date against the main site, and I 
expect eventually that will get propagated elsewhere.

> 3.  TODO list?  I've seen the Known Bugs listing, but it lists somewhere 
> around a half dozen items only...I'm sure there's GOT to be more than that??

If the RHEL source packages were what they actually used without tweaks,
creating another distribution from them should be only the minor but
widespread work of cleaning up trademarks.

> 4.  FAQ/more info- yep, read the HOWTO link, which is good reading, but 
> the fact I'm asking #s1-3 above makes me thing WBL could certainly use 
> some more docs ;-)  Anything planned or any links I've missed?

Download it and try it.  I have installed it on three machines and it 
runs exactly like RHEL, including running Informix and Oracle (with the 
same minor patches needed for RHEL).

-- 
John A. Tamplin					jat@jaet.org
770/436-5387 HOME				4116 Manson Ave
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