[fab] Non-standard kernels in the Fedora Multiverse

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

As some of you may know, I've been talking with Fernando Lopez-Lezcano 
about bringing Planet CCRMA officially under the Fedora banner.

Fernando has taken up the challenge, and is taking a lot of the initial 
steps.  He's moving to use yum instead of apt-get.  He's giving the spec 
files for his packages to Extras folks for review.  Things are moving.

The sticking point, though, will be the kernel.  High-end audio 
applications absolutely require the lowest latency possible, so Fernando 
is rolling his own kernels with Ingo Molnar's real time patches.  These 
aren't mainline yet, and they aren't likely to be in the foreseeable 
future.  They also can't be abstracted out into separate kernel modules, 
from what I've been able to divine.

Therefore: we have no mechanism currently to deliver Fernando's kernel.

At least, that's what I thought -- until I learned that Fedora Core is 
actually shipping a non-standard kernel for Xen.  If you want to run a 
dom0 box, you boot into the Xen kernel.

Which brings up a few questions for me:

1. If it's okay for RH to put nonstandard kernels into Fedora, then 
shouldn't it be okay for the community to put nonstandard kernels into 
Fedora?  If not, why not?

2. Do we keep the Xen kernel close to the standard Fedora kernel?  If so, 
how do we do that?

I'd really like to be able to make Planet CCRMA a standard Fedora install 
by FC7.  Is it possible?

--g

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