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@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@xxxxxxxxx
