[Gllug] Major corporal damage to the Kernel?

[Richard Jones]

On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 05:27:38PM +0100, Thomas Charles Robinson wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-05-03 at 15:01, Richard Jones wrote:
> > The .src.rpm contains the stock kernel plus all the patches which were
> > applied to arrive at the Red Hat kernel.
> 
> Doesn't this break support with Red Hat? My understanding is that Red
> Hat only support installations of their product if you stick to their
> kernel or pay extra for support on your specific customisations.

This is true for the Enterprise Linux versions[1]. And for obvious
reasons if you think about it. It would be almost impossible to
provide support for _any_ kernel. There would be no way to know
whether the problems were down to Red Hat, or (more likely) tweaks and
modules introduced by the customer. There would be no way to build up
a database identifying common solutions across customers.

The other significant point is that many of the extra patches added by
Red Hat are _fixes_ for problems found in the stock kernel. Red Hat
obviously isn't going to support a kernel where you've intentionally
removed these fixes.

_Unlike_ almost all other operating system vendors, if you don't like
Red Hat's policy on kernels, you are quite free to go to someone else
for support (or fix it yourself). This is what free software is all
about.

Rich.

[1] I don't know what the support situation is for the consumer
versions.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London) and Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
C2LIB is a library of basic Perl/STL-like types for C. Vectors, hashes,
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