Speaking of SATA...

Paul Iadonisi pri.lugofnh at iadonisi.to
Wed Feb 23 15:27:00 EST 2005


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




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