Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

Some development model notes

Posted Oct 28, 2004 12:31 UTC (Thu) by lacostej (guest, #2760)
Parent article: Some development model notes

One of the reason behind this new model was to have distributions use a more or less stock kernel. Anyone has information on whether distributions now patch less their kernels than before?

(Log in to post comments)

Simple stats on Mandrake Kernels

Posted Oct 28, 2004 15:52 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

[alex@cambridge SOURCES]$ bunzip2 -c linux-2.4.25-q2.tar.bz2 | tar -tv | grep "patches" | wc -l
545

and for 2.6

[alex@cambridge SOURCES]$ bunzip2 -c linux-2.6.3-q7.tar.bz2 | tar -tv | grep "patches" | wc -l
274

However not entirely unexpected as there are a lot of backported features in the 2.4 kernel that where 2.6 features. I suspect as more of the desktop "features" make it into the mainline the more patches will drop out.

Simple stats on Mandrake Kernels

Posted Oct 28, 2004 16:01 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

However the Mandrake Cooker kernel has jumped ahead

[alex@cambridge SOURCES]$ bunzip2 -c linux-2.6.8.1-q10.tar.bz2 | tar -tv | grep "patches" | wc -l
428

So the answer would seem to be no, not yet.