Re: RFD: Kernel release numbering

Jesper Juhl
2005-03-04T12:06:24Z

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Randy.Dunlap wrote:
>
> Maybe I don't understand? Is someone expecting distro
> quality/stability from kernel.org kernels?
> I don't, but maybe I'm one of those minorities.
>
I certainly do, and I think many others do as well.

My assumptions/expectations on vanilla kernels has changed a bit over
time, and I don't expect as much from them these days as I once did.

I used to expect/assume (and this was back when I had never touched a
single line of kernel code nor read a single post on lkml), that 1) the
vanilla kernel was the ones with all the latest bugfixes and features 2)
the latest stable vanilla kernel had gone through extensive testing
(manual and automated) to make sure there were no regressions compared to
the previous release 3) I could always go from <stable_series>.X to
<stable_series>.X+1 without any features having disappeared 4) that a new
vanilla kernel would never be released if there were still known bugs in
it (even if those bugs were not regressions).

I've become wiser since then, and I'm more aware of the level of testing
actually done, so I expect to be hit by bugs/regressions in vanilla
kernels once in a while. But I still expect a very high degree of
stability/quality from stable series vanilla kernels in general..

I run vanilla kernels on all my boxes, workstations and servers, since I
don't really trust vendor kernels. I don't want to start relying on
features only available in a single vendors patched kernel so that I will
have trouble if I switch vendor (or want to get some new feature that's in
vanilla but has not entered the vendors kernel yet). I've also had bad
experiences in the past with patched vendor kernels being more unstable on
my boxes than the vanilla kernels.. and then there's the testing issue, if
everyone ran vendor kernels then who'd be testing vanilla?

--
Jesper Juhl