How are fedora kernels modified from vanilla kernels

[Brian Mury]

On Sun, 2004-24-10 at 20:57 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> But one short answer is: there's a new development model with the 2.6 series
> of kernels, and an important part of that model is that distribution kernel
> branches are the "actually stable", and the official 2.6 releases subject to
> surprising changes. (The kernel developers point out that this is less a
> change and more a reflection of the way it's been in reality anyway.)

Thanks for the info, Matthew. 

I don't run the standard Fedora kernels because I use Win4Lin. I build
my own because the Netraverse-supplied Win4Lin-enabled kernels leave out
stuff I need, but either way it's a generic kernel.org kernel.

I understand some distros have Win4Lin support included in their
kernels. Might be nice if Fedora did this...


> More on this here: <http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3513>
> 
> A quick look at the patches shows that the big (as in K) ones are:
> ext3-online-resize (44K), exec-shield (44K), netdump (49K), mlock (49K),
> ext3-reservations (54K), 4g4g (126K), modsign-mpilib (204K), and tux (337K).
> 
> Tux (the in-kernel static-content web server) accounts for 45% of the total
> lines of added code.
> 
> Module signing (there was something about this on one of these lists awhile
> ago) is another 28%.
> 
> And in fact, the eight patch files listed above acconut for more than 85% of
> the lines changed.
> 
> So actually, investigation may be swaying me back to the "it's lightly
> patched" side -- plus a handful of moderately big additions.
> 
> Take a look at the source RPM -- many of the patches actually have short
> comments explaining what they are, or else are pretty obvious from the name,
> or can be searched on.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
> Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
>