On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 04:21:00PM +1100, Jonathan Kelly wrote: > I was wondering what others do in regards to keeping up-to-date with > kernel releases. Doesn't anyone know a good site that gives an overview > of what's happening in the kernel? It's getting harder to know these > days what to go with. I had some bad experiences with going with the > latest and greatest recently, and decided to go down the Alan Cox > branch (2.4.13-ac8), as that seemed a bit more conservative (and stable). > That seems to be a bit behind the times now as their upto 2.4.17 pre > releases.
Well, the ChangeLogs are usually posted both at www.kernel.org (in the right subdirectory) and wherever the release announcements are made (initially to the kernel mailing list and then to places like linuxtoday.com and others). Also, it's definitely worth reading the kernel-traffic summaries each week and then following the links from there to the kernel mailing list archives for the threads that apply to you (http://kt.zork.net). Linux Weekly News (http://www.lwn.net) also has a good summary of the kernel archives each week which is worth reading. As far as "keeping up with the Smiths" goes, you need to decide what your aims are. Grabbing a kernel that has just been release places you in the "willing to test and not going to cry when something eats your filesystem" category (whether you like it or not). Assuming you prefer to wait a little while to let others test it first, it then depends on what new features the kernel offers. My method is this: for most of this year I have been following the -ac kernel series pretty closely. I would read the ChangeLog and see which areas were likely to affect the hardware and features I used (Alan is excellent at including all the features he added/touched). I would then wait a day or two to see if there was an "oops .. it eats filesystems" bug fix and then install it on various machines that I could afford to have nuked to test. Only once in the last year did this method bite me: one -ac kernel had problems booting with the BIOS in certain Dell laptops and, of course, my laptop had that BIOD so I got an oops almost immediately after booting. No data was lost, though and I just booted back to the old kernel and way off again. My opinion here is that it's important to really know what level of risk you are comfortable with what level of risk you are comfortable with. Watch the relase announcements carefully. When the maintainer or the person supplying the patches says "be careful, this is a big merge", listen to them! I avoided a number of -ac kernels and pretty much everything from 2.4.13 to 2.4.15 (wisely, as it turned out) because there was a lot of merging going on from Alan's tree to the Linus tree and this was in conjunction with other changes, so there were bound to be a few missteps. Things seem to have settled down again and 2.4.16 is running happily on one machine. The short answer to your question is that there is no (as far as I know) big "dummies guide to recent kernel changes" around, but reading the kernel-traffic archives and the LWN archives should give you a pretty good idea. Cheers, Malcolm -- Save the whales. Collect the whole set. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
