>>> On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 7:48 AM, in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Stahr, Lea" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We use SuSE on the z. The original reason was the support for our > environment. Last week at the IBM Expo, two presenters from IBM said > that they had given code to SuSE and Red Hat that only SuSE had included > in their distributions. Our two 32 bit Red Hat HPC clusters are Red Hat > today but the vendor is switching to SuSE for the new 64 bit clusters.
This is one area (among man) where the two distributions approach things differently. Early on, the SuSE (now Novell) developers worked very closely with the IBM developers to include as many of the IBM mainframe-specific patches as possible. Given the bleeding edge nature of some of the stuff, there were some problems. Now, Novell does an assessment of patches to determine how intrusive they are, and how likely they are to affect stability, versus the additional functionality provided. As a result, Novell still includes a lot of the updates in the regular maintenance stream, others on Service Pack updates, and others in new releases (SLES10, versus SLES11, etc.) Red Hat has made the business decision that they won't incorporate any IBM patches that have not been accepted into the official kernel source tree. Once a patch has been merged, they will consider backporting it to the version(s) they ship. In the case of the 2.4 kernels, this made a huge difference, because the 2.4 kernel maintainer wasn't of a mind to accept many of IBM's patches. This has changed radically with the 2.6 kernels. There are very few IBM patches that get rejected or deferred. As a result, the Red Hat 2.6 kernels and the Novell 2.6 kernels have almost exactly the same IBM patches in it. So, RHEL5 and SLES10, from a _kernel only_ perspective, are very similar in functionality. Not identical, but very similar. (For example, with SLES10 SP1, Novell picked up all the outstanding IBM patches except for the NSS one, which will likely be in SP2.) Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
