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* Still make HUGE kernel updates every few days on RHEL 6.x which, while you're reading made me wonder. we bump into kernel issues from time to time due to upd
by zobzu 15y ago
* Still make HUGE kernel updates every few days on RHEL 6.x
which, while you're reading made me wonder. we bump into kernel issues from time to time due to update, and I always wondered why the policy was what it is.
basically it seems like backports while retaining the same kernel major/minor version numbers... because a lot of it aren't just bug fixes
Note that as I have been maintaining a Debian spinoff for years I highly value RH's packages quality, and have generally been picking from RH packages for patches and stuff "that just works" (incorporating that in the debs)
Still the kernel case puzzles me ;-)
- rwmj 15y agoWe backport new features, bug fixes, hardware "enablement" etc into the same kernel. We keep the kernel structures and kernel symbols compatible (actually there's a big whitelist of approved symbols that your kernel module is allowed to call and we guarantee those will stay the same). The basic reason for this is so software vendors can write kernel modules for RHEL 6.0 which will be binary compatible with all future RHEL 6.x releases. (The kernel modules will need to be recompiled when RHEL 7 comes out). This involves lots of careful review of backports to make sure (eg) that all kernel structures like task_struct stay compatible. I'm not involved with this directly, but all I can say is it's a pretty amazing achievement over a ~4-5 year development cycle and ~7-10 year update cycle. I assume that we keep the kernel major.minor version the same to reflect this. 'Course the release number changes each time ...