Debian 12.3 Delayed Due To An EXT4 Data Corruption Bug Being Addressed

[mdedetrich]

And so? It's not only Red Hat, but dozens of others including Linux kernel developers. You can have direct contact with core Linux kernel developers in case of issue (not only 20 times per year).

You can contact them if you want, but they are not obliged to reciprocate unless they are working at a company at RedHat and you have a support contract with them. In fact thats the whole point of RedHat, because if you are a company that has business critical software that runs on Linux you NEED such an support contract.

[mdedetrich]

Having said this, there is also another idiocy at play here, one that many on the Linux community seem to do and that's back-porting patches from newer kernels to older kernels and for the life of me i do not understand the reasoning behind this.

Doing this is fine as long as you have a proper test suite to catch any regressions and since we are dealing with a kernel this also implies actual physical hardware testing and this is what companies like RedHat do.

ZFS also does this whenever they make a release (which is why it takes them so long to add features) but they can't be held responsible if some other distro backports a change that happens to effect OpenZFS that results in corruption issues, that isn't on them.

But yes in short you are correct, just randomly or automatically backporting fixes from later kernel release is also in my mind inanely stupid. If you are going to backport fixes in this way thats thats fine as long as its a deliberate thought out procedure where you also test whats being back ported.

This is in stark contrast to what appears to be the current state of affairs where changes are just being willy nilly backported in an automatic way without any real thought behind it.

[F.Ultra]

LOL Back at you I guess. I regularly work closely with Microsoft devs to address issues. It's called a support contract, which you get with a Microsoft support agreement. It includes 20 support incidents a year where you talk directly to the engineers working on software an area.

Guess what: it's not just RedHat employees who are paid to fix bugs. Microsoft employees do it too.

Do they really have that many issues that needs to be fixed that you have to contact them regularly? Somehow I highly doubt that which makes me believe that you two are talking about completely different things.

[mdedetrich]

Do they really have that many issues that needs to be fixed that you have to contact them regularly? Somehow I highly doubt that which makes me believe that you two are talking about completely different things.

Thats not why people have support contracts. You don't have a support contract for 20 issues per year because you expect to fill that quota every year, its because given enough time as part of software development you end up hitting some weird issues every now and then which is why you have such a contract, so you are not caught off guard. A company like Microsoft wouldn't even be that strict on the cap, they understand that on some years you may go slightly over because of unforeseen reasons.

The whole point of these contracts is so you, as a business have someone to rely on when shit hits the fan and contacting some Linux kernel dev on the ML is no way close to that.

[NotMine999]

where are all those saying that they'll never us ZFS or btrfs because ext4 is so much more reliable? 😬

Bugs, like S**T, happens.

You either learn to live with it and adapt to it ... or you stay in bed all day and survive on UberEatz deliveries and UBI.

[Mitch]

Nothing is true in your claims. Ms takes no responsibility at all. It's the worst company when comes to dealing with serious bugs and issues. You're not aware of this, because Phoronix don't talk about ms problems.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-ntfs-corruption-bug-gets-unofficial-temporary-fix/

Yeah, very responsible company.

Also, MS randomly deleted the user files of a bunch of people due to their own bug. This was back in the seeker's scandal where they registered a bunch of unknowing customers into beta programs.

They really do not take all the responsibility for their BS.

[HEL88]

Nothing is true in your claims. Ms takes no responsibility at all. It's the worst company when comes to dealing with serious bugs and issues. You're not aware of this, because Phoronix don't talk about ms problems.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-ntfs-corruption-bug-gets-unofficial-temporary-fix/

Yeah, very responsible company.

1. This error did not occur on its own, but the user must have maliciously caused it.

2. It only worked locally so the user at most could have corrupted his desktop.

3. It did not cause any data loss or data corruption.

A minor bug.

And on Linux??? Secure ZFS file system scored a mega-bug, 'modern' BTRFS file system too. Apparently a million watching eyes is not enough. Probably a billion is needed, or maybe it's enough to raise salaries to bring in better specialists?

[avis]

Volta

This wasn't an NTFS bug, that was a highly unusual exploit affecting a few people on the entire world.

Linux FS bugs often result in a data loss just by using them properly.

[woddy]

Bugs are there and will always be there, whether you are on Linux, Windows or something else, certainly in GNU/linux the bugs are public due to its open source nature, in Windows they tell you what they want, given its close nature.
Having said that, backups exist, personally in 15 years of Linux, I only had a data corruption once and I was on ext4, but regardless of the file system in use, I think they are quite reliable.
When I was using Windows 7 I had a corruption of the entire desktop.
But if you are that sensitive to bugs you shouldn't follow blogs like this.

[oibaf]

Debian 12.4 was released with the fixed kernel:

• https://www.debian.org/News/2023/2023121002
• https://www.debian.org/News/2023/20231210