ne... wrote:
On Sep 6, 2004 at 22:25, Steve Blackwell in a soothing rage wrote:
[...]
So the .521 in kernel-2.6.8-1.521 means it's been patched 521 times?
Not quite. It means that some base has had 521 patches applied. Notes that when the 2.6.7 kernel was updated to 2.6.8 in the FC tree, the patch level did not start at 0 or 1.
If you look at the spec file from the kernel src.rpm, you can see that the patch numbers are organized according to purpose:
# Patches 0 through 100 are meant for core subsystem upgrades #
# x86 is 100 - 120
# X86-64 is 220 - 239
# Patches 400 through 599 are the TUX patches
# Patches 600 through 1000 are reserved for bugfixes to the core system
# Patches 1000 to 5000 are reserved for bugfixes to drivers and filesystems
# Patches 5000 to 6000 are reserved for new drivers
# Patches 6000 and later are reserved for %if {something} patches
# but don't do that!# 10000 to 20000 is for stuff that has to come last due to the # amount of drivers they touch. But only theese should go here.
# Patches 990000 to 990099 are for SGI XFS
So your kernel doesn't necessarily have 521 patches applied, since this organization means patch numbers are not strictly sequential. There can be many patch numbers that have no patches associated with them (yet) but the numbers are reserved in the numbering scheme in case they are eventually needed.
--
-John (john@xxxxxxxxxxx)
