Sorry, there is no difference at all. My current hardware and software are working just fine, thank you. So it is not at all different than if IBM or RedHat had gone belly up. I would still be stuck with an "old kernel" or operating system, exactly as I am now because I have no upgrade path ... not at present that is.
So I will not be installing the latest and greatest because it does not include a driver I need. And apparently any support agreement will be null and void if I install the one I do need. Even if it works. ... Have to install DB2/VM and a OSA-X card. ... Really don't have time for this! ... Shouldn't have started in the first place. Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 12/27/2001 01:00:38 PM Please respond to Linux on 390 Port <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: (bcc: Dennis Wicks/infosvcs/CDG) Subject: Re: LCS drivers for 2.4.9 ? On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Dennis G. Wicks wrote: > I think that most installations where Linux/390 is being installed > or tried have already accepted that "large business risk" by installing and > using IBM hardware and software in the first place. All of which is > patented, copyrighted and licensed. I doubt that using a few kB of OCO OSA drivers > is going to be a problem for them. This is quite a bit different. If IBM suddenly decides to stop building the hardware or goes out of business or whatever, your old hardware will continue to work just fine. If, on the other hand, they discontinue the OCO driver, you're stuck with an old kernel forever (kernel modules need to be recompiled for other kernels). Take a look at the current situation, for example: The only kernel officially supported by the OCO modules is 2.4.7, which shouldn't be run in production on any networked machine because it has remote root security bugs. And that's while IBM is officially supporting those modules. > And I think RedHat severly dropped the ball. They could have easily > done the testing and talked with IBM about resolving any problems > that arose and had the OSA drivers tested and shipped with their > package. It is impossible to support a kernel that was tainted by modules without source code. Anything running in kernel space can severely mess up anything else in kernel space. It's entirely possible that using an OCO module can cause filesystem corruption, program crashes and other bad things totally unrelated to the function of the module. How do you debug this without having access to the source code? By shipping a binary only kernel module, you lose the ability to support your kernel to whoever controls this kernel module, period. Anyone claiming otherwise either doesn't know anything about kernel programming, or is telling marketing lies. > But, they cut out any installation that uses OSA cards and > have probably lost a lot of business. We'd rather lose some business than having to do bad service to a customer. What would you think of a company you bought some expensive support package from telling you "we can't fix this, you just wasted the money for your support contract."? I don't think you'd like that. > What will they decide to drop from the next release? Nothing - all of Red Hat Linux is under a sane license, so there's no need whatsoever to drop anything. If Linus were bought out by Microsoft and decided to take the Linux kernel binary-only, we could (and would) still ship a fork of the older, free version, so you don't run into the risk of Red Hat dropping driver xyz because the current version is binary-only. LLaP bero -- This message is provided to you under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
