--- Theron William Stanford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Red Hat includes several patches in their kernel source. Most or > > all of those patches are available separately, and are things you > > could put into your kernel yourself if you really wanted to, but > > then you'd have to work out any conflicts between the patches > > yourself. > > So, Red Hat is forking? Bad, bad, bad. "If I really wanted to"? > You mean to say they're making decisions for me and giving me stuff > that I wouldn't have otherwise and probably don't even need unless > "I really wanted" it? Sounds like there's stuff going in that > shouldn't, and I don't want a dirty kernel.
They're not "forking". The patches they use are generally ones developed by the kernel community, and many of them eventually get merged into the main kernel code anyway. They may also include (generally as loadable modules) some device drivers and such things that haven't made it into the main development tree yet. > Now, I may have my Linux history wrong, but if patching the kernel > is leading to conflicts, it sounds like someone (or a group of > someones) has lost control of the whole project, or that it's being > forked by the distros, and if there is no control, from what > trustworthy source do I get a decent (non-forked) kernel, along > with patches that should fit in so well that I don't have to > worry about conflicts? The "conflicts" in question arise when two different patches need to modify the same section of the code (sometimes even in exactly the same way!) When that happens, you have to manually review those sections of the code and decide which modification to keep. A couple of examples that produce conflicts (or, at least, that produced conflicts the last time I tried them): the O(1) scheduler patch and the preemptible kernel patch conflict (but are not unresolvable), and SGI's XFS filesystem patch has numerous conflicts with Red Hat's pre-patched kernel source. As far as getting an unpatched kernel source, you can always download that from kernel.org. Kernel.org also hosts many of the patches that are available. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
