[Gllug] Major corporal damage to the Kernel?

Richard Jones rich at annexia.org
Sat May 3 14:01:52 UTC 2003


On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 06:51:34AM -0700, Peter Rutherford wrote:
> As a major league newbie I am most puzzled by a
> comment 
> in a rave revue of Redhat 9 in the Linux User Magazine
> (UK).
> 
> On page 63, column 1, the author says " ... the Redhat
> kernel now 
> diverges appreciably from the stock kernel which may
> give some 
> headaches ... "

This is true .. sort of. The kernel does diverge quite a lot, but in
practice does this cause anyone difficulties? Perhaps there are some
corner cases - particularly with installation of binary-only modules -
but if you steer clear of that particular abomination you shouldn't
have a problem.

You can, of course, always run Red Hat 9.0 with a stock kernel, and
many people do exactly that when they want to play with the new
features of 2.5 or with the -ac kernels.

> Surely the strength of Linux is that the kernel is the
> exclusive 
> territory of an Enlightened Benevolent Dictator,
> arguably the 
> ideal form of government.
> 
> Doesn't this mean that, for the greater good of all,
> ordinary folk 
> can't tinker with it?

You're free to tinker with either the stock kernel or the Red Hat
kernel! They're both available in source form. To get the Red Hat
kernel, go and get it from:

ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/SRPMS/kernel-2.4.20-8.src.rpm

The .src.rpm contains the stock kernel plus all the patches which were
applied to arrive at the Red Hat kernel.

Rich.

-- 
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,
trees, string funcs, pool allocator: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/c2lib/


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