If one distro installs it doesn't mean anything

If one distro installs it doesn't mean anything

Posted Oct 13, 2005 6:29 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
Parent article: How many is too many?

It turns out that it's not really as simple as saying if one distro works on the hardware then they all will.

For example, redHat and suse do a bunch of bug fixing on they're enterprise distro's. A couple major hardware vendors target the redhat suse kernels instead of kernel.org kernels. So even if the source is there, most people don't know how to port it to the most recent 2.6 kernel.

And the other thing is that it's not easy to update the kernel. For example recent FC3 kernels needed a newer kernel need a newer version of mkinitrd with a newer version of bash. There are selinux dependencies. Udev needs to be updated. I guess the HAL stuff needs to match as well probably. I'm not sure how the PCMCIA stuff all fits together but it probably needs to be updated as well.

There are wierd problems. I think that for a while Debian wasn't distributing the tg3 driver in their stock kernel because of licensing issues. That's a pretty important ethernet driver.

When you're talking about enterprise distributions those are often based on pretty old kernels and there can be a big difference in the hardware that they support.

Then there are a bunch of cases where the Linux has multiple drivers for the same hardware. I've seen cases where only the bcm5700 driver works and other cases where you have to use the tg3 driver. There are SCSI drivers where only the non working driver is distributed in the installer. There are other drivers where it's in Redhat the right driver loads but in Suse not only is the wrong driver loaded but it's compiled into the kernel so you can't change module load order and you can't install.

And then there are ordinary kernel bugs and regressions.

It's not always easy.

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