Seven Percent

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 17:31 +0100, James Wilkinson wrote:

> > That is, that once you have
> > a kernel with working device drivers installed on a particular machine
> > there should be no reason to ever change it again - ever.
> 
> Kernel security vulnerabilities?

Those shouldn't be there, but if they must be fixed it still rarely
takes behavior-changing new device drivers to fix them.

> New features?

The feature set for a unix-like OS was pretty much complete more than
a decade ago.

> Improved performance?

>From the VM-experment of the week?  I mostly just see more memory
use and worse performance from on older hardware.

> > However,
> > you do want to stay up to date with changes in applications, and if
> > you install on a new machine you may want access to new device drivers.
> 
> Or, yes, new hardware.

That's the time you know you need a new kernel.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com