-mm/-ac Kernel Patches

[James Wilkinson]

Steven Pasternak wrote:
> I like to keep up-to-date by compiling my own kernel every now-and-then, and 
> was wonderingm, What are the -ac and -mm patches for? Thanks!

-mm: produced by Andrew Morton. Andrew is doing a lot of the
stabilisation and merging work for Linus' kernel: this is a staging post
for new and experimental code that may or may not be passed on to Linus
for his kernel.

-ac: produced by Alan Cox. Alan's kernels include bug-fixes (including
security fixes), and are used as the basis for the Fedora kernels.

Incidentally, Dave Jones has just produced
http://people.redhat.com/davej/patchlist-fc3.txt "to counter the 'Fedora
has a heavily patched kernel' memes", explaining which patches are in
the Fedora kernel and why.

Note that Linus is no longer automatically releasing kernels when
security problems are found, and I understand that his current 2.6.10 is
vulnerable to http://lwn.net/Articles/118964/ , CAN-2005-0001. (FC3
kernels after kernel-2.6.10-1.741_FC3 and FC2 kernels after
kernel-2.6.10-1.9_FC2 are fixedxp).

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
James Wilkinson       | Dell decided to deck its workstation Itanics late last
Exeter    Devon    UK | year citing the compelling reason that it hadn't sold
E-mail address: james | any.
@westexe.demon.co.uk  |     -- Mike Magee, The Inquirer, 9 January 2002.