[CentOS-devel] a mainline kernel in centos repos

Fri Feb 6 13:26:36 UTC 2015
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 6:25 AM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> lots of people in various SIGs and user side projects are keen on
> bringing up a mainline kernel, that tracks upstream closer than the
> distro kernel does.

Kernel integration and maintenance of someone else's code tree is a
lot of work.  Been there, done that, have the scar tissue and the
forced resignation of a kernel team. I have stories about that, but
the team was basically backporting desired changes from newer kernels
into their "stable" old kernel. It was the equivalent of shoving RHEL
6 kernels into an RHEL 7 operating system for "stability" and to
"perserve optimizatoins" Anyway: this kind of effort can get very
tricky, very fast, when related dependencies get involved. This is
especially true for filesystems and hardware integration. And the
resources needed can be very difficult to predict, especially when
kernel compilation is sensitive to gcc and glibc and mkfs and NFS and
dbus and USB and audio, etc., etc.

Kernel development also badly needs test hardware, at least for
regression testing. Where would this come from?