New updates in -current, including 4.14 kernel
 

Got home from work just in time to see a BIG update in -current. Lots of updates, some changes.

As for the 4.14 kernel, I had expected it to go through a few patch levels before inclusion, especially since the Nvidia legacy drivers can no longer build against it. I had already tested them this week and they won't build the kernel modules, and looking at the points of failure I see that there is no simple patch to fix it - we will have to wait for Nvidia to release the next updates (although I can honestly see them simply EOL'ing the 304 branch at this point). Maybe Pat can keep at least the 4.9.x configs in /extra for that reason?

and Postfix + Dovecot !!!
 

Woo Hoo !

Thank you Slackware team !

-- kjh

And thank you for It looks like a trivial change on the face of it, but IMO it's a big improvement and I'm glad to see it.


BTW, anyone for whom the system nodename (returned by uname -n) is significant should watch out for the hostname setting change in rc.M . If you prefer (or need) to use the shortname for your nodename then you will need to remove the domain part from your /etc/HOSTNAME to keep things the way they were.

Opinion seems to be divided about whether the fqdn or shortname should be used to set the system nodename. POSIX just says "the name of this node within an implementation-defined communications network", so there doesn't seem to be any right or wrong here.

I think the rc.M change is good as it allows the admin more flexibility, but I prefer the shortname so have adjusted /etc/HOSTNAME accordingly. This probably deserves a mention in CHANGES_AND_HINTS for those migrating.

Avoid the kernel upgrade for the moment. On three different pc hardware worked with previous kernel in current tree I have three different problems now and pc-s wont start.

I also had a kernel panic and it turns out the culprit is the watchdog module.
I fixed it by creating /etc/sysctl.d/50-watchdog.conf with this entry:
It boots fine afterwards

willysr --

Curious ... how did you determine the cause of and the cure for that particular kernel panic ?

Thanks.

-- kjh

Not booting here. It reboots instantly after I select the kernel in elilo. Works fine with 4.9.53

Home server hasn't rebooted correctly either, I'll have to see about it tonight when I get home.

Both use kernel-huge.

I looked at the screen where it halted. There's a mention about watchdog and i read an article about watchdog may caused some system to get locked up and it seems the case on my system.

Pat and Robby also managed to get some watchdog blacklisted in eudev

Ooh - Slackware 15.0. Are we there yet?

Wow! I'm not worthy...

I'm not taking this upgrade to current lightly like I have with past upgrades. A jump in the kernel series, migration to FF 57 (Quantum), a change in the default MTA and IMAP programs, changes to sysvinit and network scripts, all worthy of upgrade releases on their own.

I only run current on my main desktop and 14.2 on everything else (netbook, solid state PC and servers). I'll be on the lookout for "gotchas" before pulling the trigger on this upgrade.

Great work by the core team! This is an impressive group of changes packed into a single upgrade.

One other gotcha: I just found that the 384.90 Nvidia driver won't build the kernel modules under the new kernel either. HOWEVER, the latest 384.98 driver builds just fine. PLUS, with the new kernel now supporting my GTX-1050ti card I can now have a plain vanilla build partition on that box as well.

Thanks for the heads-up! I created the file, and my system hasn't given me any issues to speak of.

While sendmail will remain available in /extra, will postfix be a drop-in replacement for sendmail or will we need to migrate sendmail configs?

Do you mind elaborating on the benefits of this change? Not saying you are wrong, but I don't quite understand either. :)

Postfix is sendmail compatible for anything expecting to find sendmail on the system, but the config files are completely different, so you'll need to reconfigure using the config files in /etc/postfix. Luckily, it isn't all that hard. If you were able to handle sendmail's config files you shouldn't have any problem. The examples are extremely well-documented.