Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Jakob Oestergaard
2005-12-04T17:00:51Z

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 12:19:45PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 03:29:54PM +0100, Jesper Juhl wrote:
> >
> > Why can't this be done by distributors/vendors?
>
> It already is done by these people, look at the "enterprise" Linux
> distributions and their 5 years of maintance (or whatever the number
> is.)
>
> If people/customers want stability, they already have this option.

If the kernel was stable (reliability wise - as in "not crashing") then
you'd be perfectly right.

In the real world, however, admins currently need to pick out specific
versions of the kernel for specific workloads (try running a large
fileserver on anything but 2.6.11.11 for example - any earlier or later
kernel will barf reliably. For web serving it's another kernel that's
golden, I forgot which).

There are very very good reasons for offering a 'stable series' in plain
source-tree form - lots of admins of real-world systems need this.

Adrian, I like the idea :)

--

/ jakob