Kernel development

Posted Oct 28, 2004 22:32 UTC (Thu) by lakeland (guest, #1157)
Parent article: Kernel development

You raise a good point, but you have to admit that this point has been
addressed before on LWN. IIRC the comment was that the features being
added to 2.6 are no affecting stability (yet?), so there is no need to
fork (yet).

I find 2.6 extremely reliable. For personal use, tracking 2.6 is quite
painless, with very few things changing between subrevisions. In a
corporate environment, very few things changing is significantly more
changing than is acceptable, so I would discourage upgrading between 2.6
releases at the current time. Basically you can expect some changes
between 2.6.x and 2.6.y, even if both x and y are perfectly acceptable
from a reliability perspective.

So in conclusion, don't hold off the upgrade to 2.6, but don't bother
upgrading within 2.6. My guess is that the best option is to go with your
distributors 2.6.x kernel. It doesn't matter what x is, I find them all
reliable enough. If there are any problems with it, your distributor will
release a new version of 2.6.x, so you should never have to upgrade to
2.6.y. When your distributor chooses to upgrade to 2.6.y, you can expect
to see much fewer changes than you saw from 2.2 to 2.4, and from 2.4. to
2.6.

All my opinion, etc.