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Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux DistributionKuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux DistributionPosted Mar 12, 2011 10:29 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (subscriber, #143)Parent article: Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution
I don't use RH at the moment, so this isn't directly relevant to me, but I have to wonder why someone isn't already designing a tool to take a monolithic patch and search a git repository for matching changesets. Seems like it should be reasonably straightforward (even though it might be slow). Even if the results weren't 100%, such a tool could probably identify a substantial number of the public changesets incorporated by RH in their kernels, leaving a much smaller chunk of unknown patch to deal with.
(This might not help in a case where someone keeps all their changes private, except for a monolithic patch, but as I understand it, RH does push pretty much all of their changes upstream to git in some form or other, and the only real question here is which specific changesets they're using in a specific kernel binary.)
If this isn't happening simply because people still have more respect for RH than for Oracle, and would feel uncomfortable undermining RH to possibly benefit Oracle, despite distaste for RH's current actions, then I understand (that's actually a part of why I haven't looked into it myself).
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Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 12, 2011 11:27 UTC (Sat) by adobriyan (guest, #30858) [Link]
People who work with kernel on daily basis and follow developments in mainline, can do this faster than some tool. :^)
This whole monolithic issue only seriously affect clueless who thinks that if patch applies to different kernel, it's OK to apply and ship it.
In fact, RedHat could just strip changelogs from individual patches to put them in panic mode.
Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 12, 2011 12:27 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] If it was really the case that the change doesn't affect anyone, RedHat wouldn't have made it.Or alternatively, if RedHat considers everyone else clueless and unable to understand patches, they really wouldn't have made this change, since all those clueless people were just going to waste their time building broken kernels by applying RH patches directly, without testing or understanding. And that just makes RH look better! No, clearly RH understands that this does affect some clueful people, a particular subset of which they really want to make things difficult for...
Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 12, 2011 12:41 UTC (Sat) by adobriyan (guest, #30858) [Link]
> If it was really the case that the change doesn't affect anyone, RedHat wouldn't have made it.
I'm not saying that.
Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 12, 2011 18:34 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link] People who work with kernel on daily basis and follow developments in mainline, can do this faster than some tool. :^)I was under the impression that most such people ran their own kernels in any case. I was thinking more of independent developers who are trying to support their own code, but aren't generally afraid to trace a problem into the kernel when it seems necessary—I've found myself in that exact position a few times in my life. If your users are reporting different results on, say, Debian vs. Red Hat, you might want to do some quick-and-dirty triage, but with a monolithic patch set on one side, that becomes much, much harder. Of course, the last time I had to face a similar circumstance, the kernel devs were mostly still using BK, and I didn't want to deal with that whole mess, so I was forced to debug the old-fashioned way, but now the kernel devs are using the same VC that I use for most of my own projects, so I'd be much more likely to be irritated and inconvenienced by RH's monolithic patch.)
Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 12, 2011 20:13 UTC (Sat) by jondkent (guest, #19595) [Link]
> If your users are reporting different results on, say, Debian vs. Red Hat, you might want to do some quick-and-dirty triage
Obviously that might be possible, but the RH kernel is such a mess of backports and patches, that realistically these days you'd be better off banging you head on the desk than trying.
Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 14, 2011 13:39 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
To be honest when I've done that I've often combined a pile of printk()s in the kernel with comparison with upstream git. The RH changelog sequence wasn't terribly useful (in fact I'm not sure I used it at all).
Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 14, 2011 23:38 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
Or buying a RedHat support contract and asking them to bang their heads against the desk until the problem is solved. After all that is how they make their money.
Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution Posted Mar 13, 2011 0:44 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] As has been explained numerous times already, the RHEL 6 kernel is numbered 2.6.32, but that is only because that was the starting point: It has pieces that are much nearer 2.6.34, and even 2.6.37, than 2.6.32. So the patches with respect to 2.6.32 are mostly massive backports and tweaks on top of that. So trying to identify the patches by comparing to the 2.6.32 stable series is futile.
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