Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source [LWN.net]

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Feb 28, 2011 18:04 UTC (Mon) by Rubberman (guest, #70320)
In reply to: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source by BenHutchings
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Well, just download the SL6 (Scientific Linux 6) kernel instead... :-)

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Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Feb 28, 2011 18:08 UTC (Mon) by daney (guest, #24551) [Link] (6 responses)

... or CentOS.

Which points to a possible motivation for the change.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Feb 28, 2011 18:17 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

I really can't see how sending a tar ball versus a tar ball and 2000 patches is meant to do anything for CentOS beyond making their life easier. CentOS does not have kernel developers or people who are going to disect which patch did what. They have people who do a mock rebuild of a package and put it in a tree. Having just one source ball to deal with cuts down their complexity quite a bit.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Feb 28, 2011 19:08 UTC (Mon) by jebba (guest, #4439) [Link]

How does one huge tarball make it any easier to rebuild with mock? If they are simply doing just `mock kernel.src.rpm` it makes no difference if it is a huge tarball or 2000 patches. If they do go to try to understand the differences, the huge tarball makes it harder.

This has the makings of a short term mistake on Red Hat, Inc.'s part which is going to continually bite them for the next decade (think: old gcc patch, that *still* gets brought up)....

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Feb 28, 2011 21:37 UTC (Mon) by lolando (guest, #7139) [Link] (1 responses)

There's another "downstream" that maybe Red Hat wouldn't be too sad to see inconvenienced, because after all they compete directly. Begins with an O, and claims to be unbreakable.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 1, 2011 4:40 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

This makes sense. It would certainly impact the commerical cloners (like Oracle) more than the open source white boxers (CentOS, SL, etc).

Oracle might have to spend some money understanding what it is they are supporting in order to get those support contracts.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 9, 2017 18:15 UTC (Thu) by phred14 (guest, #60633) [Link] (1 responses)

I thought there was a cozy relationship between RedHat and CentOS since something like 2014. CentOS gets an animosity-free product. RedHat gets a loss-leader. (Oh, you want business-class support?)

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 9, 2017 18:19 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

CentOS was essentially acquired by Red Hat.

https://lwn.net/Articles/579551/

So they work together fine.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 1, 2011 4:37 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

How does downloading from Scientific Linux or CentOS help? Those distributions just download the source from Red Hat, rebrand, rebuild, and redistribute. You are not going to get a differenent source file and patch set than the one that Red Hat provides.

Am I wrong?