Lamar Owen wrote:
Having done significant testing on Ubuntu (primarily because of the superior software repository and lack of the 'mixing' issues), and having done some support of 'ordinary' users on Ubuntu, let me say this: when it comes to the kernel interfaces, Ubuntu suffers the same fate as Fedora does. Have to do that same things if you want to run VMware, for instance. The kernel interface issue is upstream, and any distribution tracking 2.6 is going to have unstable kernel API's. It is not a Fedora disease; it is a kernel development process disease, and it's broken.
Have you looked at any of the OpenSolaris distributions with GNU userland like Nexenta yet? I think they are too new to think about stability yet, but Solaris has a remarkable history of maintaining backwards compatibily more or less forever, so it seems promising.
The decision to drop having a stable, security-updated, kernel line stinks. If you run a CentOS or RHEL base, you are going to have a stable kernel with security updates, backported by Red Hat. But, you know, I've had a few issues even there, where a kernel update did weird things (like reorder NIC's,
Which is just incredibly painful when most of your servers are in remote colo sites and you expect to be able to connect with ssh after a reboot... How is it even possible not to consider that situation?
remove support for an older RAID controller, etc). Reading the release notes and changelog isn't even enough for some of these patches; one must in some cases track the actual source RPM patchsets and changes, on certain hardware. At least the VMware binary modules drop in happily without a recompile.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
