Kernel Issues

     The kernel issues are not resolved but I am making progress.

     I have been running customized kernels for eons because I can get more efficiency and better response than the kitchen sink kernels that are distributed with a Linux distribution like Ubuntu.

     From 5.15 forward there have been some minor stability issues that became major in 5.17 and remains through 6.0 although rc0-rc4 were stable.

     I wasn’t aware that my specific configuration was causing issues, but the fact that nobody else on bugzilla.kernel.org seemed to be having this issue caused me to take a look at that possibility.

     To test it, I installed Ubuntu 22.10 on my workstation.  I try to avoid non-LTS releases in general, but I installed this release because it had a 5.19 kernel.  I then tried that kernel on four servers, it was stable.

     Now, two possibilities remained, either Ubuntu had fixed stability issues in their fork of the kernel OR their configuration was stable.  To test which of these was the issue, I took 5.19.11, the most current release, and compiled it using Ubuntu’s configuration file.  Now when I did this it altered many settings on it’s own, I’m not sure if this was because Ubuntu has kernel hacks the mainline kernel doesn’t or because of changes between 5.19.0 upon which Ubuntu’s kernel was based or 5.19.11 upon which my kernel was based.  None the less, this kernel also appears stable.  I am going to let it run for a few days on four of our busiest servers to test.

     If it runs clean for a few days I will install this kernel on all of our servers.  It will slow them down a tad but hopefully this is temporary.  My intent is once I get to a point of stability, I will add one of my changes at a time and test.  This way I can identify exactly what configuration option is causing issues, then I can look and see what code is affected and from that be able to file a much more detailed and specific bug report which hopefully ultimately will lead to a fix.