[Gllug] Custom kernels

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Henrik Morsing wrote:

> 
> > Redhat have always shipped 'customised' - read patched kernels.
> > For instance, the latest RH kernels come with NPTL. There was a report.
> 
> Patched yes but IBM has been changing code in the kernel and also
> developed parts they felt where missing. Filesystem changes was one of
> them. I've heard of one more but can't remember which one.
> 
I don't think you understand what is meant by patching.

For example, I built a 2.4.23-pre5 kernel at the weekend, and did some
heavy CPU and disk stress testing on a cluster.
As these are Opteron machines, I applied an entire patch set from Andi 
Kleen at SuSE, in order to get a working kernel for x86-64
These patches are publicly available.

IBM may be applying patches to use one of their filesystems -
but I seriously doubt if they are using closed-source code.


What we SHOULD maybe be discussing in the Linux community is
binary-only drivers. 
For example nVidia or the VIA drivers for their MPEG decoder.
Class, discuss :-)


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