Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Mon Sep 10 12:46:55 UTC 2007
Alan Cox wrote:
>> Personally I think it was a mistake for any distribution to ship the 2.6
>> kernel before an experimental 2.7 branch was started to keep the
>
> There are no plans for a 2.7 kernel branch.
That's my point. Perhaps if no distribution had shipped 2.6 until one
was started, we would have a place for experimentation besides
production servers. Or if not, we'd still be running something stable
anyway.
> Kernel updates are also
> neccessary to fix stuff for people. Its a trade off - the more people's
> systems you fix the higher risk of breaking something. The people who get
> working boxes are generally happier their box works.
I still get the Centos 3.x updates that match RHEL3.
> Besides you don't *have* to update the kernel. You can keep the older
> distro kernel, or go even newer (I run the current -mm dev tree kernels
> for most stuff). You can't go back before about 2.6.12 without funnies
> but set up right you can run very old kernels with very new Fedora
In the old scheme with an odd-numbered branch for experiments, 2.2 and
2.4 became very stable at around X.X.20. I don't see that happening
with 2.6.
> I have a 2.6.9 kernel on my build box - because that was the new kernel
> last time it was rebooted
Yes, with 2.6, older doesn't mean better, just different. But where are
your security updates?
> [root at hraefn linux-2.6.23rc3-mm1]# uptime
> 11:17:13 up 902 days, 15:44, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
>
> and apart from udev its running FC6 having been live updated from release
> to release for about 2.5 years.
>
>> breakage away from their users - hence the bulk of my servers are still
>> running a 2.4 kernel.
>
> That must be fun. I don't know many enterprise users who consider 2.4
> viable for deployment - and not just for lack of supported hardwar.
It is fun to have machines run for years with virtually no attention or
surprises. In fact I think that's the way it is supposed to work. 2.6
hasn't. I was hoping that as it reached the X.X.20 mark it might, but
without a development branch for things like changing the disk naming
scheme I don't really expect it.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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