[CentOS-devel] Balancing the needs around the RHEL platform

Wed Dec 23 21:38:19 UTC 2020
Phil Perry <pperry at elrepo.org>

On 23/12/2020 20:50, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 08:23:29PM +0000, Phil Perry wrote:
>> Take Wireguard VPN as an example. No sooner than upstream fixed the
>> breakage caused by -257 on Monday, -259 landed and broke it
>> again[2].
> 
> 
> It seems like Wireguard might be a good example of something for an
> alternate kernel maintained by a SIG. (Like the Xen SIG does.)
> 

Why would you do that? The method we use in Enterprise Linux to deliver 
3rd party out-of-tree drivers is the RHEL Driver Update Programme. It 
has been this way for over a decade. It works really well. It just 
doesn't work for Stream because the Stream kernel is not suitable for 
end user (Enterprise) consumption - it is a development kernel for 
developing the next RHEL point release.

If Red Hat really wanted to fix this in (a) kernel, the solution would 
have been to accept the repeated upstream requests to backport the 
driver into the RHEL kernel, but that idea/request has been rejected.