Stabilization is for Distibutors [LWN.net]

Stabilization is for Distibutors

Posted Oct 10, 2004 23:20 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Stabilization is for Distibutors by miallen
Parent article: Quotes of the week

I agree that it's an oversimplification to say that Red Hat "replaces" its kernel with something from kernel.org. Red Hat never ships kernel.org kernels.

I also agree that Red Hat ignores some kernel.org releases.

But based on the naming of Red Hat kernels, it appears to me that they track kernel.org pretty closely. Within a few months of 2.4.X appearing on kernel.org, Red Hat has a kernel called 2.4.X-Y and doesn't support anything earlier. I guess Red Hat might be carefully scrutinizing all the changes from kernel.org and omitting destabilizing ones, but I think only a modicum of that could be practical and consistent with the naming.

By contrast,that practice isn't going to cut it with 2.6. Red Hat needs to change its kernel much more slowly than Linus changes his to have a viable commercial product.

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Stabilization is for Distibutors

Posted Oct 14, 2004 6:44 UTC (Thu) by wmshub (guest, #3995) [Link]

If you are using the Red Hat enterprise, then they clearly do *NOT* put things out without a lot of testing. RHEL3's latest kernel is based on 2.4.21 - with, of course, a very large number of patches. RHEL isn't planning on releasing a 2.6-based version until around next Spring - a year or more after 2.6 was out!

So I think that, for enterprise products, Red Hat does test very well, and very differently from kernel.org. I haven't used SUSE et al, but I would guess that they would do the same.

Now if you're on Fedora, you are getting something with a lot less testing...but then, if you really want high stability (for example, if your business depended on the system's stability), then you wouldn't be on Fedora.