[CentOS-devel] Query regarding contributing RPMs to CentOS Repo

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:37 AM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:

> The key to working out a plan for Uday's kernel is going to be driven by
> how he intends to support it and do maintenance work in that space.

Taking this opportunity, I'd like to share my recent experience that
might show what it's like to maintain non-distro kernels.

For those who are not familiar, ELRepo (Alan Bartlett) maintains the
latest mainline kernel for RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux as 'kernel-ml'
[1]. When the first release candidate for kernel 4.2 (4.2-rc1) came
out, Alan immediately noticed it did not build under RHEL 6. Long
story short, a piece of kernel code in the netfilter section was not
compatible with gcc 4.4.x (used in EL6) [2]. Apparently, kernel
developers did not test-build against "older" versions of gcc.

Despite the fact the patch was submitted at the early stage of the 4.2
RC process, the fix did not make it into kernel 4.2. So, there was no
kernel-ml 4.2. Fortunately, the patch was added to kernel 4.3-rc1 and
,therefore, kernel-ml 4.3 could be released.

With regard to kernel 4.2, the patch had to be backported. It was one
of several hundreds of patches that were waiting to be added by
GregKH. It eventually happened with kernel 4.2.4.

The whole thing involved email exchanges, testing proposed patches,
etc. So, here we are talking about commitment ...

Akemi

[1] http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-ml
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/7/5/74