Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 11:36:44 +0100 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Giorgos Keramidas <charon@labs.gr> Cc: Bzdik BSD <bzdik@yahoo.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linux VM : forky? Message-ID: <20011031113644.A19189@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <20011030160736.B41047@hades.hell.gr>; from charon@labs.gr on Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 04:07:37PM %2B0200 References: <20011030012025.49292.qmail@web13605.mail.yahoo.com> <20011030051923.A36388@hades.hell.gr> <20011030102804.B60885@lpt.ens.fr> <20011030160736.B41047@hades.hell.gr>
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Giorgos Keramidas said on Oct 30, 2001 at 16:07:37: > > Of course you do understand that patching the kernel, and making it > different than the one which has been tested with the particular > release, is something akin to kernel hacking, since you are no longer > using the `official' kernel of your distribution. If bad things > happen with a kernel like this, but not with the kernel your > distribution's latest release came with, you can't blame Linux :P That statement seems to imply that the linux kernel *has* forked, with the number of forks = the number of distributions. However, the incompatibility is not as bad as you suggest. I've replaced the stock kernel in Red Hat several times: in fact the machines started off with RH 5.0 and kernel 2.0.x, and I upgraded rpms individually as time went by and upgraded the kernel to 2.2.x, and the machine remained pretty stable (uptime generally > 100 days, downtime basically due to power problems). I wasn't talking about bad things happening with new kernels: I was talking about the difficulty of applying two different patches (say, one for pre-emption, one for some improved device driver) from two different sources. Even if both were generated against the same vanilla Linus kernel, they may still have conflicts with each other. In that sense I think linux right now is more like -current than -stable, even though it's even-numbered and supposedly stable. That article makes the problem clear: 2.4.x, despite being a "stable" release, had a VM which was not good enough. That had to be fixed and that meant big changes. The author seems satisfied with AA's VM, now. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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