> Ross "closed the loop", so I'm reopening it. <evil grin> > > On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Jim Wenzlaff wrote: > > > I have read about the patch on Developerworks, but it is still somewhat > > unclear to me where to start. Can the patch be installed on the Redhat or > > SuSE distributions? > > I would expect the patch to work on either RH or SuSE (or Turbo > or Millenux or ...). The distributors will apply kernel patches > to optimize or fix specific bugs, but generally should NOT be > producing kernels with "affinity" for their own distro. > (That would be to fragment Linux; not in anyone's best interest.)
Still there will be configuration choices that may impact how well the binaries fit in. I'm familiar with IA32 so my comments are specific to that, but should illustrate the point well enough. Red Hat makes some choices about filesystem support. ext3 is in (as of recently) and built as a module. xfs and jfs are not (one of them is in the rawhide kernels though). Reiserfs has been built for some time but not supported by the installer. ntfs and hpfs are not built. If Dingo Linux has ext3 built in instead of being built as a module, then its initialisation scripts and configuration files will not work with a Red Hat kernel for some users (those who use ext3 for starters) because ext3 will not be loaded. However, a Dingo Linux user should expect to be able to build a kernel for Dingo-Linux from the Red Hat source. I discovered this kind of issue when I built some Mandrake package (cdrecord I think) for RHL and discovered some minor install errors. -- Cheers John Summerfield Microsoft's most solid OS: http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/ Note: mail delivered to me is deemed to be intended for me, for my disposition.
