Stable kernel 2.6.38.7

Posted May 23, 2011 14:11 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: Stable kernel 2.6.38.7 by ledow
Parent article: Stable kernel 2.6.38.7

The car analogy brings an interesting insight. Adjusting the timing belt on one car is time consuming. There is a certain risk of something going wrong. You would not trust a random person to do that.

And if a car maker decides to adust timing belts on all cars of a certain model and year, that can cost many millions of dollars.

Even though car safety matters to drivers and car makers, the decision to make repairs is not always obvious. Testing is important so that the impact of the changes can be compared to other factors, such as cost and rsiks of damaging something during the service.

Upgrading kernels may be trivial on a personal laptop of a power user, but it may be expensive and risky on a large server or a critical embedded system. Impact of the bugs is relevant when such upgrades are considered.

Stable kernel 2.6.38.7

Posted May 23, 2011 15:54 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (3 responses)

I think that the approach used to be "if you can't decide yourself based on the commits, you shouldn't use this kernel but the one from your distributor".

Stable kernel 2.6.38.7

Posted May 23, 2011 16:24 UTC (Mon) by arekm (guest, #4846) [Link] (2 responses)

No idea why so many people think there is some magic "distributor". In many cases there isn't. People are their own distributors/vendors and there is no "upper" one beside authors of the software.

Stable kernel 2.6.38.7

Posted May 23, 2011 17:34 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

No idea why so many people think there is some magic "distributor".

Because this is 2011, not 1993. I would expect that by all reasonable metrics, people who don't use a third-party distribution (be it Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, or whatever) are a fairly small minority of the Linux user base.

Stable kernel 2.6.38.7

Posted May 23, 2011 17:44 UTC (Mon) by arekm (guest, #4846) [Link]

Maybe small "user" base but surely bigger "developer" base.

Stable kernel 2.6.38.7

Posted May 23, 2011 17:49 UTC (Mon) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link]

> Upgrading kernels may be trivial on a personal laptop of a power user, but it may be expensive and risky on a large server or a critical embedded system. Impact of the bugs is relevant when such upgrades are considered.

And thus enterprise Linux was born. :D

I'd be willing to bet that -- outside of some niche use cases -- if you're running a critical server on Linux, you're doing it on an enterprise-oriented distro, and thus the distro maintainers (to whom you likely pay a good chunk of change) help address the risks involved.