On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 8:06 PM, Konstantin Olchanski <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 02:46:49PM -0500, Kevin K wrote: > > Depending on what special features you might use on your system > (virtualization, third party drivers), it might be possible to build a > kernel from kernel.org. I've tried this in the past but since the latest > kernel still didn't properly support the broken hardware I didn't pursue it > further. > > > Yes, what you say is possible. I run a few SL5 machines with a custom > built 2.6.34 kernel (the funny hardware requires non-default access > method to PCI config space). > >From previous work with older releases, it becomes an adventure. If you're building and bundling them manually, it can be vaguely possible. But differences in your build environments can accumulate and cause issues. (Anyone remember the gcc fork issues with gcc-2.96, way back in the days of yesteryear?) And dependencies of drpm building, grub integraton, and compatibility with third-party packages such as found at elrepo for NVidia can get pretty overwhelming, pretty fast when you're backporting modern releases to old operating systems, or vice versa. You've actally made me wince in memory: way back in the days of [favorite vendor name] 6.2, long vefore [favorite vendor name] Enterprise Linux 6.2, I dealt with a bunch of kernel developers who had optimized the 2.0 kernel for certain applications. They refused to cooperate with the kernel upgrade to 2.2 as part of the new OS. Claimed that any feature we needed in 2.2 could be backported to 2.0, only they were always "too busy" to actually do the work. This, of course, was ridiculous. When I got their 2.0 source tree unraveled, I found what had really been altered. It was one file, and the patches for 2.2 had already been published by the same outside kernel developer who'd published the original 2.0 patches. I never did get to have the meeting with the manager to discuss why we were paying those salaries and very expensive office space and meeting time for kernel developers.
