RHEL kernel patch backport [was Re: Are you running Linux as your desktop?]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| Well if it was an old HP AMD64 (probably with an ATI chipset, as HP
| often used that), then yeah those did tend to be quite a pain and I do
| remember tons of kernel patches attempting to fix those types of problems,
| usually not very successfully.

The chipset was an nVidia nForce3 150 SPP
<http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00064822&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=ca&site=null&lang=en&product=404646&key=null>

This predates ATI getting into the chipset business.

|  Probably not the kind of hardware people
| would normally buy for business use.  Fair enough then I suppose,

Businesses are conservative.  They didn't buy AMD64 machines at that
time.

| I must admit, I am not convinced redhat's kernel choice for RHEL is the
| right one.  Sticking with one kernel for 5 to 7 years and continuously
| backporting new features and drivers to it just doesn't make sense to me.
| Either stick with the kernel as is and say this release is for hardware
| that was available at release time, and newer hardware will need to use
| a newer releease or at least a newer kernel, or just upgrade the kernel
| once in a while.  After all those backports can be risky, quite possibly
| more so than a complete new kernel would be.  I think they are giving
| people a false sense of stability by keeping the old kernel version.

Red Hat's product seems to make their customers comfortable: it is the
most successful commercial Linux (excluding embedded stuff for obvious
reasons).

Their kernel strategy is probably part of what makes their customers
happy.  At least they must think so: it costs them a lot to maintain.

I like the stability of CentOS for some purposes.  But I don't like
that it is getting so stale.  RHEL 6.0 is out so CentOS 6.0 ought to
follow soonish.

I admit that I don't have a feel for Debian.  It might be as good or
better than CentOS for my purposes.  The closest I get is that I use
Ubuntu as a sort of appliance distro: easy to pour onto a system (or
use live) and slick, but somewhat clashing with my culture.  I'm
pretty sure that I'd like the Debian culture better.
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