kernel source code

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 11:26:52PM -0500, William Beebe wrote:
 > I like Fedora for many reasons, not the least of which is I can pull a
 > stock kernel off kernel.org, build it, and boot it, with FC3. With
 > nothing more than the normal download-unpack-and-make dance I can run
 > with the bleeding edge (or the latest fixes, depending on your point
 > of view).
 > 
 > Having said that I support the current change to how sources are
 > supplied as long as this state of affairs continues. I look at my
 > experiences with my other distro here at home, SuSE 9.1. With SuSE I
 > have had the devil's own time learning how to build a stock kernel
 > that will boot with SuSE. For the longest it would stop after
 > unpacking the kernel and right before booting the root device, saying
 > it couldn't find the bloody thing. So if for some reason FC starts to
 > behave like SuSE with regards to stock kernels, well, I don't what
 > I'll do. Cry into my beer, I guess. And go buy a Mac.

We've been pretty good in this regard for FC2/FC3, but we're not
perfect by any means. We've had some deviation away from mainline at times.
The one that sticks in my mind most recently is the patch we added to
FC3 to allow SELinux attributes on tmpfs -- A few folks noticed
that things went a bit funny when they tried to run with a stock 2.6.9
[the actual patch turned up in mainline in 2.6.10]
We do try to not merge stuff that's going to cause such grief though.
That one only got in because it was pretty much a required feature
for usable SELinux in FC3, and 2.6.10 was a way off when FC3 was released.
Actually by the time most people had installed FC3, ISTR it was actually
merged in 2.6.10rc too, so it was only a problem for folks not wanting
to apply prepatches, or -ac/-mm patches.

When we're not hacking Fedora kernels, some of us work on upstream
too, so it's in our best interests to make sure we can continue to
do so :-)

 > As a satisfied customer all I ask is please fix what you break before
 > I find out about it :)

It seems we did :-)

		Dave