Re: when distros do not support official Marcelo kernels they are not being team players (was Re: reiserfs on redhat advanced server?)

[Bernd Schubert <bernd-schubert@web.de>]

On Tuesday 04 February 2003 23:22, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 16:45, Hans Reiser wrote:
> > The official kernel is our kernel community's only chance to overcome
> > its fragmentation.  We need to support it.
>
> We do support the official kernel, by actively developing and improving
> it, and by answering questions on public mailing lists.  When things
> work in our kernel (like reiserfs, or andrea's vm etc) we work to get it
> into the vanilla kernel.  We're also constantly updating our work to
> keep it in line with the current vanilla sources.  It takes a while due
> to the volume of patches and testing required, but we're always working
> on it.
>

Hmm, I know its out of topic, but I want to take my chance and complain about 
the Suse kernel.

We are currently testing one of our servers with non-free software and only 
get a pre-compiled kernel module from this company. Unfortunality they only 
have kernel modules for well knows Distros, such as Suse, RedHat, etc and it 
seems to be very difficult to convince them to compile it for a vanilla 
kernel.
So we are using a Suse kernel on Debian. For some reason we couldn't use the 
binary and had to recompile the kernel from the source Suse provides. Well, 
until it came to the module part everything was fine, but then errors 
orrcured and we had to find the config options to disable those modules. 
Since we first tried to use the config-options Suse had set as default, the 
Suse-people *MUST* have seen themselves that it doesn't work this way. 
The other thing I'm strongly wondering about, is what for nomal home users 
need a kernel that has kdb and other very seldom used patches included. Which 
usual home-user (and that is what I thought to be Suse for) needs kernel 
debugging? IMHO kernel debuggers won't have a problem with patching a kernel 
themselves.

Finally we got it working and could even load the module, but later on we 
figured out that nfs file locking for imports from another server isn't 
working properly (/proc/mounts shows that it is enabled, but e.g. 'man' 
complains that it is not). Well, actually I'm wondering that anything works 
in such a stronlgy patched kernel. 
Of course, the nfs file locking works when we use a vanilla kernel.

So whom shall I blame it is not? Suse, and tell them we are only using their 
kernel (and this not even without some force)? And I believe people from the 
kernel mailinglist won't feel responsible, too.

Just a few reasons why I don't like using distros' kernels !

Best regards,
	Bernd

PS: The kernel is 2.4.19-4GB, I've forgotten which one of Suses subversions it 
was, but it was rather high (174?).