Filesystems

[Hans Fugal]

On Thu,  1 Sep 2005 at 23:41 -0600, Gabriel Gunderson wrote:
> I think you will see less of this as time goes by.  I hear a lot of talk
> about how they are not trying to deliver a finished product like you
> would expect someone like Red Hat to deliver.  They realize that the
> majority of kernels in the wild were packaged by a distro and they don't
> seem to want to duplicate that effort when they could be working on the
> next big thing.  I'm not saying you can't run a vanilla kernel, I'm just
> saying that they are not trying to productize it.

They have been saying that forever.

> Now, kernel stability should be up to your distro.  If you can't get a
> stable kernel from them... then it's time to jump ship.  In three years
> with Red Hat (and now CentOS) kernels I've only seen one (1) kernel
> panic and it was my fault for messing with the modules for digium
> hardware (zaptel).  I don't know how others have done with them. YMMV.

I have never, never, met a distro kernel that I like. Thankfully most of
them do work, but I have had battle with stock kernels from the
following: redhat, rhel, suse, sles, mandrake, and yes debian. Distro
kernels have to be everything for everyone, and they fail miserably. I
am not a kernel hacker or distro kernel packager, but in my opinion all
this backporting is a Bad IdeaTM, and part of the stability concern. Not
to mention a real pain if you need to replace a buggy kernel on say
RHEL, where some programs depend on 2.6 features that have been
backported into the RHEL 2.4 kernel, and on the flip side it is a
nightmare to upgrade the box to 2.6 (e.g. because of NPTL). 

Just my in-the-wild $0.02.

-- 
 .O.  Hans Fugal            | De gustibus non disputandum est.
 ..O  http://hans.fugal.net | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg
 OOO                        | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach
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