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>I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Debian is great but I can't say this is a shared experience. In particular, I've b

by madars 1y ago

>I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Debian is great but I can't say this is a shared experience. In particular, I've been bitten by Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable (specifically, backport regressions in the fast-moving DRM subsystem leading to hard-to-debug crashes), despite Debian releases technically having the "same" kernel for a duration of a release. In contrast, Ubuntu just uses newer kernels and -hwe avoids a lot of patch friction. So I still use Debian VMs but Ubuntu on bare metal. I haven't tried kernel from debian-backports repos though.

bayindirh 1y ago
Which GPU, display server and compositor stack are you using?
- madars 1y ago
  Integrated Intel GPU and no graphical system, just KMS VT (text console). That's what made it so frustrating - only displaying a console should not result in kernel panics under CPU load! Admittedly, the experience was anecdotal and years ago and I heard Debian is doing less of a RHEL-style "frankenkernel" now.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Intel's integrated GPU driver team, actually all driver teams, had a period of frequent screw-ups a while back (five years ago? Time flies). They also borked e1000e driver in the same period. On the other hand, I had and still have many Debian installations, some with Intel integrated graphics. None of them created any problems for a very, very long time. To be honest, I don't remember even any of my Intel iGPU systems crashed. ...and I use Debian for almost two decades, and I have seen tons of GPU problems. I used to write my Xorg.conf files without using man, heh. :) Maybe you can give Debian another chance.
  - ACS_Solver 1y ago
    drm/i915 was a pretty miserable experience for me on one machine. The Intel drivers for that chipset around the 5.3 kernel era weren't good, I recall lots of bug reports at the time. Below is one of the several issues that I was affected by https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/673 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/673
brirec 1y ago
These days all of my “Debian” bare metal systems are technically running Proxmox, which I think is a relatively happy medium as far as the base Debian system goes — the Proxmox kernel is basically the Ubuntu kernel, but otherwise it’s a pretty standard Debian system. I’ve thought about (ab)using a Proxmox repository on an otherwise stock Debian system before just for the kernel…
- guerby 1y ago
  Same at $work all physical servers run proxmox VE (by policy), 90% of VMs are debian (cloudinit genericcloud), the rest misc linux and various windows.
kasabali 1y ago
> Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable Needs citation. Debian stable uses upstream LTS kernels and I'm not aware of any heavy patching they do on top of that. Upstream -stable trees are very relaxed in patches they accept and unfortunately they don't get serious testing before being released either (you can see there's a new release in every -stable tree like every week), so that's probably what you've been bit by.
- raggi 1y ago
  LTS has had major breaking changes in various areas in recent times too, virtio was badly broken at one point this year, as was a commonly used netlink interface. Hat tip to the Arch kernel contributors who helped track this down and chase upstream, as we had mutually affected users. The debian and ubuntu bug trackers were a wasteland of silence and user contributions throughout the situation, and frustratingly continued to be so as AWS, GCP and others copied their kernel patch trees and blindly shipped the same problems to users and refused to respond to bugs and emails. You're right stability comes from testing, not enough testing happens around Linux period, regardless of which branch is being discussed. It's not easy testing kernels, but the bar is pretty low.
  - b112 1y ago
    Bear in mind, LTS and ELTS are not Debian maintained. The wiki has more info on this.
    - aragilar 1y ago
      I think they mean the LTS kernels, not Debian's LTS.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - b112 1y ago
        Yes, seems so, thanks.
seba_dos1 1y ago
The upstream kernel already backports enough regressions on its own to its stable releases, Debian's kernel team does not help them too much with that.

by madars 1y ago

bayindirh 1y ago

Which GPU, display server and compositor stack are you using?

madars 1y ago
Integrated Intel GPU and no graphical system, just KMS VT (text console). That's what made it so frustrating - only displaying a console should not result in kernel panics under CPU load! Admittedly, the experience was anecdotal and years ago and I heard Debian is doing less of a RHEL-style "frankenkernel" now.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Intel's integrated GPU driver team, actually all driver teams, had a period of frequent screw-ups a while back (five years ago? Time flies). They also borked e1000e driver in the same period. On the other hand, I had and still have many Debian installations, some with Intel integrated graphics. None of them created any problems for a very, very long time. To be honest, I don't remember even any of my Intel iGPU systems crashed. ...and I use Debian for almost two decades, and I have seen tons of GPU problems. I used to write my Xorg.conf files without using man, heh. :) Maybe you can give Debian another chance.
- ACS_Solver 1y ago
  drm/i915 was a pretty miserable experience for me on one machine. The Intel drivers for that chipset around the 5.3 kernel era weren't good, I recall lots of bug reports at the time. Below is one of the several issues that I was affected by https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/673 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/673

brirec 1y ago

These days all of my “Debian” bare metal systems are technically running Proxmox, which I think is a relatively happy medium as far as the base Debian system goes — the Proxmox kernel is basically the Ubuntu kernel, but otherwise it’s a pretty standard Debian system. I’ve thought about (ab)using a Proxmox repository on an otherwise stock Debian system before just for the kernel…

guerby 1y ago
Same at $work all physical servers run proxmox VE (by policy), 90% of VMs are debian (cloudinit genericcloud), the rest misc linux and various windows.

kasabali 1y ago

> Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable Needs citation. Debian stable uses upstream LTS kernels and I'm not aware of any heavy patching they do on top of that. Upstream -stable trees are very relaxed in patches they accept and unfortunately they don't get serious testing before being released either (you can see there's a new release in every -stable tree like every week), so that's probably what you've been bit by.

raggi 1y ago
LTS has had major breaking changes in various areas in recent times too, virtio was badly broken at one point this year, as was a commonly used netlink interface. Hat tip to the Arch kernel contributors who helped track this down and chase upstream, as we had mutually affected users. The debian and ubuntu bug trackers were a wasteland of silence and user contributions throughout the situation, and frustratingly continued to be so as AWS, GCP and others copied their kernel patch trees and blindly shipped the same problems to users and refused to respond to bugs and emails. You're right stability comes from testing, not enough testing happens around Linux period, regardless of which branch is being discussed. It's not easy testing kernels, but the bar is pretty low.
- b112 1y ago
  Bear in mind, LTS and ELTS are not Debian maintained. The wiki has more info on this.
  - aragilar 1y ago
    I think they mean the LTS kernels, not Debian's LTS.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - b112 1y ago
      Yes, seems so, thanks.

seba_dos1 1y ago

The upstream kernel already backports enough regressions on its own to its stable releases, Debian's kernel team does not help them too much with that.