It appears that there was a gcc bug in rawhide for long enough to hose
quite a few packages when they got recompiled. For example: firefox
crashes (can be fixed by downgrading to older xulrunner), GIMP hangs
when you try to use the dodge / burn tool, the GIMP
help-browser plugin crashes, the applet icon
for gnome-volume-control-applet is corrupt, the applet icon
for the system-config-printer applet is messed up, vino was
crashing (although this particular problem seems to be fixed in
newest rawhide package), /usr/lib/sa/sadc
is crashing.
In addition, the rawhide kernel is reporting tons of
"list_add corruption" call traces in the dmesg output, and as far
as I can tell this may actually be causing some applications to
malfunction -- I saw Picasa, for example, behaving in weird ways that
seemed to stop happening when I switched to an older kernel without
this problem.
The links above are to all the tickets I and others have filed in
bugzilla about these issues. But there are two serious issues about
which I haven't filed tickets because I'm unsure how to categorize them:
- Even when I'm not actually doing anything on my system that
should be causing significant load, the load average hovers between
around 1.5 and 2.5. Until recently, when I wasn't doing anything
actively, the load average stuck pretty close to 0, where it should be.
- Audio is pretty hosed. First, none of the devices in /dev/snd
were owned by me even though I'm logged in on the console, so I
couldn't get any audio at all. I changed them to be owned by me, but
then I had to do all sorts of fiddling with alsamixer -c0 just to get
sound to come out of xmms. It's not a good scene.
Just giving people a heads up that upgrading to rawhide right now seems
a bit risky. If you have any advice for me on how to mitigate any of
these issues, I'm all ears.
Thanks,
jik