( I am not sure how your answer related to the Karthik's question since you can build all kernel.org release kernels as rpms, but here goes.. )
Shakthi Kannan wrote: > It depends on what the user wants the kernel for. If the user wants to > do device driver/kernel development, the developers insist to use > stock kernels from kernel.org, not the distro kernels. The distro > kernels are heavily patched by the distro kernel maintainers. This is usually[1] not true with Rawhide since so much of kernel upstream is actually using it themselves. Not only kernel, a very large number of upstream work on the Linux platform is based on and around rawhide. You will also find that patches are regularly committed against older branches even at kernel.org I am presently working on a 2.6.9 patch for ext4 that i hope to push upstream, since its likely to be of use to a lot of people. And I regularly sync Xen's 2.6.x patchset to 2.6.9. IF all development for everything only happened in Trunk/Head - things are going to get rather bleak for linux outside academic and developer communities. > Patches/enhancements to the kernel are done against stock kernels, and > may not apply cleanly to distro kernels. Yes, but take that with a pinch of sald since this changes a lot - eg, a lot of enterprise grade h/w vendors ship drivers specific to a kabi used with the release, to avoid needing a ko rebuild every time the kernel updates. Some of these people ( 3ware and Areca are famous for this ) wont support your system running a kernel.org kernel at all. On the other hand, a lot of functionality is built against a requirement ( think ydl doing the ps3 stuff in linux ), and that development too happens against a static target then merged up later ( I am not sure if all the boot stuff even made it upstream as yet.. ) And if you just need to enable options in the kernel tree already running, nothing is easier than doing it via a manageable package route, makes maintaining it really easy. anyway, i think this started out as a how-to-rebuild a kernel, and i still think if you are using Fedora, use the rawhide kernel. Or if you really cant wait 48 hrs or so, use the spec there to build a kernel.org image if you like. - KB [1] A lot of people working on the kernel actually prefer a semi stable kernel since that allows them to focus on what they are doing and the part of the source tree they are working with while keep an eye on changes that might affect them, they really dont want the daily patch grind stamping on their system regularly, or till merge anyway. -- Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
