On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 20:23 -0500, Derek Martin wrote: [snip]
> Secondly, if you're using Red Hat kernels, it's entirely possible that > the bug you're seeing is not present in the Linus-blessed kernel. Red > Hat adds a lot of patches to increase functionality/compatibility, > improve performance, and fix bugs... These patches may not make it > into the mainstream kernel for quite some time (if ever). Depending > on your problem, Red Hat may be your ONLY recourse. Although still true to some extent, it's less common than it once was. The bug issue is still true, since Red Hat does incorporate patches to fix upstream problems, but the feature issue isn't all that common anymore. On fedora-test-list or fedora-devel-list it was a stated goal a while ago to stay as close to upstream as is possible not just for the kernel, but for the entire distribution. Between, I think, FC1 and FC2, Red Hat when from around 400 patches down to around 40. That went back up a bit when FC3 was releases for various reasons, but the goal remains to try and stay as close to mainstream as possible. I suspect that *may* have something to do with Andrew Morton's statement some time last year that he was going to deliberately make life difficult for those (and "you know who you are" was thrown in there somewhere) who strayed too far from the kernel.org kernel ;-). For the record, I think Novell/SUSE was in a worse predicament at least not too long ago (I don't no about current releases). There were no less than *1000* patches in the source rpm for the kernel in SUSE. That, I'm sure, made it an extreme challenge for SUSE to re-base to a new upstream version of the kernel and retrofit every one of those patches. Hopefully, they've taken the more sane approach and backed off on the number of changes they make. -- -Paul Iadonisi Senior System Administrator Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist Ever see a penguin fly? -- Try Linux. GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss