Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

Oracle aside, various other distro kernels are based on 2.6.32-stable too. RHEL6's kernel is _not_ based on 2.6.32-stable. That said, RHEL6's kernel does contain many of the same upstream linux-2.6's "stable@kernel.org" fixes that feed into 2.6.32-stable.

But due to the various 2.6.3[45678] backports that the RHEL6.x kernel has seen the code has diverged considerably from 2.6.32-stable. This divergence is to the point that most fixes made to RHEL6's kernel are either irrelevant to or do not apply cleanly to 2.6.32-stable. The fixes would be more suitable to apply to 2.6.36-stable, 2.6.37-stable, etc. Red Hat kernel developers do mark appropriate upstream linux-2.6 fixes with: "Cc: stable@kernel.org".

So Red Hat's fixes really do flow back to "stable@kernel.org" kernels -- unfortunately (for Oracle, Novell, Ubuntu, Debian, etc) those changes are not overly useful to 2.6.32-stable based distribution kernels. NOTE: all "stable@kernel.org" kernels do not allow new features whereas the RHEL6's kernel does.

It would require quite some surgery to backport the RHEL6.x kernel changes to 2.6.32-stable (because the implicit requisite feature surgery is _not_ possible in a "stable@kernel.org" kernel). The challenge associated with trying to backport RHEL6's changes to 2.6.32-stable will only grow over time.