On 2013-10-23, Keith Keller kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us wrote:
I'm doing a very informal and unscientific poll: which kernel do you use on your CentOS machines?
Thanks to all for what was a surprisingly interesting thread! Here are my very informal and unscientific tallies. This isn't actual systems, of course; it's counting people's responses, so my ~10 vanilla kernels count as one Stock in the tally below.
Stock: 16 CentOS Plus: 5 ELRepo -ml: 3 ELRepo unspecified: 2 Custom build: 2 ELRepo -lt: 1 Stock + ELRepo kmods: 1 Oracle: 1 OpenVZ: 1
No big surprise in the results; most people tend to stay with the stock kernel, but quite a few people use one of the others. I imagine that more people who didn't respond would be more likely to be stock kernel users, so the numbers are probably a bit skewed towards the tinkerers and funky hardware or kernel feature requirements.
People's reasons for using a non-stock kernel were also not a huge surprise. I don't recall anyone saying that they use a different kernel just to be recent; in the cases I remember everyone had a reasonably specific reason to use a non-stock kernel. That also makes sense here; it stands to reason that CentOS users want stability, and stray from the path only when stability is compromised by sticking with stock.
Thanks all for responding!
--keith