On Monday 26 November 2007, Kelly Miller wrote: > Lamar Owen wrote: > > He wants a stable kernel but a more up to date userland so that the > > kernel driver ABI doesn't change but userland does. > > Lock the kernel so it's not updated? That's an option for a short-cycle distribution like Fedora (or non-LTS Ubuntu, for instance); but is untenable for anything that needs kernel and base library security fixes for longer than that. I've exercised that option an a couple of machines which are pretty critical to me; but I've always considered that to be a workaround and not a fix. For RHEL, Red Hat goes through the laborious process of backporting certain fixes to their 'gold' kernel version. This is an enormous effort and should not be underestimated. They then choose to make those backports public (GPL only requires they distribute source to those who get the binaries of the distribution) so that others can benefit. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
