Using Rawhide

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Hello. I’m thinking about rebasing to rawhide (currently I use Silverblue bootc 43) on my only laptop. Can any rawhide users out there share their experiences about using it, e.g: whether serious breakages are common, are there any performance issues (i heard rawhide uses kernel with debug symbols, which may impact performance) etc. In general: is using it as a daily-driver a good idea? I read the docs and several threads, but I honestly still don’t have any idea.

Edit: day after this post i moved to rawhide and so far, I’m pretty happy.

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Rawhide is supposed to always work, but it’s not expected to used for production.

You must expect that at some point rawhide will break badly and you will lose all data and have to reinstall.

If this is acceptable to you then try rawhide otherwise stick with fedora 42.

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I don’t mind occasionally having to reinstall (i use f43 alpha after all😅), i have backups and setup script, so it’s not a problem, but I still use my machine and it would be nice to have it work

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Then go for it! Please report any issues you find in the fedora bugtracker.

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Why do you want to run a “beta” OS on your only system? What does Rawhide provide that Fedora 42 doesn’t?

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Because I can and because I want to.

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I agree with Barry and would add a few things.

Right now, Rawhide isn’t much different from Branched, but after the release of F43 it will start to move away and differentiate. It is very likely that at some point, the rollback to F43 will be broken and even impossible.

That being said, I think it would be very useful for the project if you could use Silverblue Rawhide as a daily driver and report any issues.

A few years ago, I used Fedora Server Rawhide for about a year on a bare metal production machine as a host for number of Fedora CoreOS next stream virtual machines containing several WordPress sites and an nginx reverse proxy in Podman Quadlets. For about a year I only had one minor issue, namely that for a few hours I didn’t have SSH access to the machine, but it was working. If I remember correctly, it was a kernel issue.

However, Fedora Silverblue contains a desktop environment and I think it is expected that it will not work flawlessly.

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Yup, I’m fine with a couple of bugs here and there :slight_smile:

Thank you all for your answers, after current I-can’t-boot bug will be fixed, I’m gonna rebase.

I also read more about kernel debug symbols stuff and now I know what’s up. Worst case scenario I’m gonna make a custom image with kernel-nodebug.

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Make sure you always have a working USB live install on hand as a get-out-of-trouble option.

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I always have one just in case xD it saved my skin a couple of times

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The size if the rawhide kernel is about the same as the Fedora42 kernel. If you need debug symbols, there are corresponding kernel-debug-* packages available.

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Rawhide’s kernel comes with debug symbols by default (unless its stable or rc). I meant more about how to get rid of them. My biggest worry is a performance side of things here, but I’ll see once I actually move.

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That was the case in the distant past, but as of ~2 years ago, it’s not anymore…

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Wiki page lied to me😱 /lh

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Which one?

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This one: Kernel/Rawhide - Fedora Project Wiki

I lack the knowledge to edit these pages properly, so I leave these links for some good Samaritan to fix them: KernelDebugStrategy - Fedora Project Wiki RawhideKernelNodebug - Fedora Project Wiki

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From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelDebugStrategy

The other way to tell is by looking in koji at the produced RPMs. If the build contains a kernel-debug- package, the default kernel- package is a non-debug kernel.

Then look at the latest rawhide build at koji at https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=2809341 and check if the build contains a kernel-debug- package.

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