On Friday 13 July 2001 09:32 am, Raymond Shwake methodically organized
electrons to state:
>
> I wanted to try Mandrake as an alternative to RH 7.1 on my
> dual-CPU desktop, but discovered, as the NeTraverse-provided SMP
> kernel was installing, that Reiser FS is not included in the kernel.
> Since that's what I'm running, the kernel is useless. When might we
> see such an obvious feature supported (heck, it's one reason I'm
> considering Mandrake)? Or must we once again roll our own kernel?
I, too, was surprised that the reiserfs module is not included in the
Win4Lin/Mandrake SMP kernel.
While I certainly appreciate the efforts of NeTraverse in supplying
pre-compiled kernels for Mandrake 8.0, neither are "drop-in" replacements for
Mandrake 8.0 machines. It seems that they do not patch Mandrake sources, but
use generic kernel sources. In this manner, some of the Mandrake features
(which include the Alan Cox patches, reiserfs and supermount) probably aren't
in there. My understanding is that the Mandrake patches and the Win4Lin patch
conflict somehow; I have been unsuccessful in patching the Mandrake sources
for Win4Lin and getting the resulting kernel sources to compile.
One of the missing enhancements is reiserfs and that does cause considerable
difficulty since, as it is in this case, reiserfs is a significant reason
many people choose Mandrake over it's cousin, RedHat. At the very least, the
Win4Lin kernel should include an initrd that loads the reiserfs module (when
the Win4Lin kernel. If it's not needed, it can be disabled in lilo.conf.
Attempts to use an already existing initrd cause problems.
I realize that Mandrake does some "special" things in the process of
compiling their own kernels and they are not very forthcoming with many
details about the process, but it seems that the goal of NeTraverse should be
to compile as close to "drop-in" as possible.
In a similar vein, I do not believe that NeTraverse should be expected to
supply working patches for the kernel-of-the-day, just the kernel version
that ships with the distro. That kernel should be a drop-in replacement,
however (no versioning problems, no error messages when loading, built from
the Mandrake-patched sources).
Also, it would be nice for NeTraverse to provide the sources as well (isn't
that required by the GPL anyway?).
Hoyt
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