[Ocfs2-users] ocfs2 is still eating memory

[John Lange]

Lets be clear, we have 4 licensed copies of SLES10.

What we will not do is pay for premium support just to get the system to
operate as advertised. And besides, what would premium support get us?
Does it make the system magically start working? No. Does it mean Novell
will fix the bug quickly and send us a patch? No. It actually just means
that they _might_ let you report a bug and they _may_ think about fixing
it but probably not. More likely they will just send you another
response with some excuse about how they can't do anything (see below).

I'm starting to see a lot of high priests sitting in towers at Novell. 

See if this quote rings true:

"I believed that the most important software ... needed to be built like
cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of
mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before
its time."

It's starting to seem like someone at Novell needs to read the
"Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Let me be clear, I think the SUSE products are among the best! But there
is no possible way they can stay that way unless Novell stops trying to
impose a closed source mentality.

Fundamentally, OpenSource requires that users not only have access to
the software, but to be part of the development process which includes
bug reporting and interaction with the developers.

And in return we are happy to pay for licensed copies to support the
OpenSource development process.

Lars, I see your other reply explaining the way SUSE/Novell operates and
I want to make sure you understand that I really do appreciate that you
are personally taking the issue seriously.

However, I want to tell you that if you are waiting for this to appear
in the official support channel you are going to be disappointed. This
is the reply from Novell support:

"the version of SLES that you are running is unsupported through the
official channels. When you installed SLES 10 SP1, you had to click
through a license that stated that it is Beta software and that we
cannot provide support."

Just to be clear, we are _not_ running SP1. We are only using the Kernel
of the day in an attempt to fix the memory problem.

And in any case, we aren't even asking for support, we are just trying
to report a bug through the proper channels.

John

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 16:37 -0800, Sunil Mushran wrote:
> If you are running a prod shop, you should looking into buying support.
> 
> John Lange wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 13:46 -0800, Sunil Mushran wrote:
> >   
> >> Well, kswapd is supposed to flush the caches. As in, the vm
> >> controls the lifetime of the inodes in the inode_cache not ocfs2.
> >>
> >> All ocfs2 can do is free the memory associated with the inode when
> >> asked to. And it does that when you manually flush the cache. Qs is
> >> why the vm is not doing it on its own. (fwiw, you are on a beta kernel.)
> >>     
> >
> > We are using beta kernels in an attempt to solve this problem. As
> > everyone knows, the most recent official SUSE kernel (2.6.16.21-0.25 i
> > believe?) completely broke ocfs2. Downgrading to 2.6.16.21-0.15 solves
> > that problem but the memory issue remains.
> >
> > So as far as I am aware, there is no SUSE kernel that works with ocfs2
> > which is where we find ourselves today.
> >
> > I just upgraded to the latest KOTD:
> >
> > 2.6.16.42-SLES10_SP1_BRANCH_20070307114604-smp
> >
> > And still, when running ocfs2, all ram gets consumed.
> >
> > Right now Novell is playing the "you don't have premium support" game so
> > where should I report this bug?
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > John Lange
> >
> >
> >   
>