Wanna give me a hand debunking this?

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday 26 November 2007, Kelly Miller wrote:
> Lamar Owen wrote:
> > He wants a stable kernel but a more up to date userland so that the
> > kernel driver ABI doesn't change but userland does.
>
> Lock the kernel so it's not updated?

That's an option for a short-cycle distribution like Fedora (or non-LTS 
Ubuntu, for instance); but is untenable for anything that needs kernel and 
base library security fixes for longer than that. I've exercised that option 
an a couple of machines which are pretty critical to me; but I've always 
considered that to be a workaround and not a fix.

For RHEL, Red Hat goes through the laborious process of backporting certain 
fixes to their 'gold' kernel version.  This is an enormous effort and should 
not be underestimated.  They then choose to make those backports public (GPL 
only requires they distribute source to those who get the binaries of the 
distribution) so that others can benefit.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu