On 11/12/2020 12:02, Josh Boyer wrote:

Now For Stream I am mainly worried about 2 things:
1 - the kernel and its impact on drivers from Elrepo and other external
repos (OpenZFS!). Not important for RHEL, but important for people that
use old hardware that requires drivers not in RHEL.

Others have expressed this concern, and it's a good one.  It would be
interesting to see if someone could create a CentOS Stream SIG that
did automated rebuilds of those drivers with every Stream kernel
update.

You know, it would be much much better if CentOS Stream included a new "kernel-classic" repo containing the latest RHEL point release kernel. Some mechanism would need to be invented to easily switch to/from it and make it the default but that would address, I suspect, about 95% of ELRepo problems. It's not exactly a difficult thing for the CentOS team to do since they already have all the infrastructure, the knowledge, the procedures and even the ability to make it secure bootable.

Since probably 80% of kernel releases are RHSA updates, that means they are for security anyway so having those built and put into a "kernel-classic" repo would solve a lot of the objections to this abandonment of CentOS users. If Red Hat wanted to exclude the RHBA/RHEA kernels from that rebuild process then I'm not sure that many people would miss those.

It's probably not ever going to fix Red Hat's reputation after this debacle but it might go a bit of a way to addressing _some_ of the more serious objections to it.

Trevor Hemsley
Soon to be Ex-CentOS QA, Ex-CentOS Forum Moderator, Ex-CentOS IRC op