[CentOS] RHEL / CentOS Kernel Updates

nate
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:44:31 -0000

Manish Kathuria wrote:
> How are the updated kernels released by Red Hat / Cent OS related to
> the latest vanilla kernels ? Are the changes, new features and
> drivers, etc. available in the newer kernels also ported to the
> updated kernels released by Red Hat in their entirety ?

If your comparing RHEL/CentOS kernels to kernel.org kernels they
are similar but Red Hat adds a ton of patches(v4 is upwards of
100+ patches). New features are typically not backported to
current versions of the kernel, newer drivers are often back
ported, assuming the driver existed in the RHEL kernel. If the
driver did not exist then it's much less likely to get included.

> For the lifetime of a distribution like RHEL 4 or RHEL 5, Red Hat
> would stick to the same major and minor number of the kernel and would
> just change release numbers. What  is the relation, if any, between
> the new kernels and the updates released by Red Hat ?

They make their systems ABI compatible throughout the lifetime of
the major version(4.x, 5.x).

If your looking to stay on the leading edge with kernel updates your
best off using another distro maybe Fedora or something. If your
looking for a stable system that you don't have to worry about even
if it means you have to be more careful about picking what hardware
you run it on, RHEL and CentOS are good choices.

You can always build your own kernels on RHEL/CentOS if you wanted,
or rebuild Fedora kernels and install them on RHEL/CentOS, in most
cases it should work.

nate