[CentOS-devel] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

On 12/11/20 7:02 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 6:43 AM Louis Lagendijk <louis at fazant.net> 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.

As part of this, having the kernel version pinned to the current kmod is 
useful; don't update the kernel if all dependent kmods aren't available 
in updated form.  For that matter, keeping the versions of the kmod 
installed for the still-installed older kernels would be very useful; 
that way you can always boot into the older kernel and things will still 
work.  (for instance, on our R710s, once you update kmod-megaraid_sas to 
the version for the new kernel you can't boot the older kernel, and 
there may be circumstances where that might be necessary).  Or maybe 
this is just a job for the CentOSPlus kernel, if it were available on 
installation media.


> There are probably ways that people can still selectively update based
> on what changed, but it is true that Stream will have a more frequent
> cadence.  However, it's worth pointing out that the update frequency
> isn't the same across the entire package set.  We have packages in
> RHEL that rarely update, and if they do they are for bugfixes.  Only a
> portion undergoes a lot of activity every minor release.
The difficulty here will be with updates that require a reboot.