RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 2, 2009 23:54 UTC (Wed) by smadu2 (guest, #54943)
In reply to: RHEL 5.4 released by qg6te2
Parent article: RHEL 5.4 released

Is there any analysis somewhere of how different RH/CentOS .18 kernel from the stable .18 kernel tree ? If so, why did not they make into upstream ?

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RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 3, 2009 0:51 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

it's a combination of things that

1. redhat has choosen not to submit upstream

2. features/drivers that were introduced after 2.6.18 that redhat has backported to their kernel (with the nessasary changes to make it work with older infrastructure)

the redhat kernel maintainers are _very_ aware of what patches they maintain, and have been making a significant effort to reduce the size of that patch set

RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 3, 2009 2:31 UTC (Thu) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] (1 responses)

the redhat kernel maintainers are _very_ aware of what patches they maintain, and have been making a significant effort to reduce the size of that patch set

In what sense? The set of patches for RHEL 5 (2.6.18) has increased, no? I'm sure the kernel used for RHEL 6 will be at first far closer to upstream, but overtime we'll end up with another huge patch set. (I'm not counting Fedora here, given the 1 year lifetime of each release.)

RHEL 5.4 released

Posted Sep 3, 2009 3:21 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

well yes, the list of patches to 2.6.18 will keep growing as long as redhat maintains it.

but (other than the initial set (which is what I was referring to above) almost all of the patches are patches _from_ the upstream kernel, so there is nothing to try to push upstream.

you must not remember the bad old days (in the 2.4/2.5 kernel era) where redhat had so many patches to their kernel that they were becoming incompatible with other distros due to all the 'extra' stuff that they included.