Question about kernel updates

[Jaap A. Haitsma]

Thanks Sean and Dave

Learned something again today

Jaap


Dave Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 09:29:37PM +0200, Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:
> 
>  > Maybe a stupid question, but I'm just curious: why does RedHat (and also 
>  > other distro providers) do this? Why don't they just ship the official 
>  > 2.4.22 kernel and just wait until the 2.4.23 kernel gets released?
> 
> Because theres no guarantee 2.4.23 will be out any time soon.
> It could be six months off for all we know. There are patches going
> into the pre's that fix known problems, so merging the 'obvious fixes'
> is something that's always happened. The riskier bits have been held
> off. For example, the VM updates that are currently going into 2.4.23pre
> which some early-adopters are noting problems with.
>  
>  > It's probably due to the fact that the RedHat Linux kernel is a modified 
>  > version (a fork) of the official kernel. But is this forking/merging 
>  > worth the effort? It takes quite some time to do all this and also there 
>  > is a possibility to introduce extra bugs.
> 
> When there are known fixes in the pre's, just ignoring them and shipping
> a product without because the next stable kernel hadn't been released
> doesn't sound too useful.  I wish it was this easy. You're right that
> its a lot of effort. It's a full time job tracking 2.4, judging whether
> something is needed or not in the RH kernel, merging, adapting 
> (due to NPTL and other largescale changes), and testing.
> 
>  > Wouldn't it be better for RedHat if  RedHat just sends the patches to 
>  > Linus and company, and just accept the fact that they maybe don't accepted?
> 
> A majority of whats been merged in the last few weeks are patches that
> already have been accepted upstream.
> 
> 		Dave
>