[CentOS] newbie kernel question

[Bogdan Nicolescu]

--- Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 20:15 -0500, Jim Perrin wrote:
> > > Jim thank you for the leads.
> > 
> > Sure, but actually, Johnny had it right on the
> money. I forgot about
> > the kernel notation in the release notes. It's
> very similar to what
> > was posted in previous threads, and probably has
> that "Official" tone
> > you were hunting for.
> 
> The question was, can you do it .. you can
> 
> as to whether or not you SHOULD do it .. that is a
> different question
> entirely.
> 
> Unless you know more about building kernels than the
> RH development team
> and/or the CentOS development team ... or unless you
> have a problem that
> can not be solved in ANY OTHER WAY ... then you
> should use the stock
> kernel.
> 
> The stability of the kernel and the way it interacts
> with the rest of
> the system IS what makes CentOS.  It is an
> Enterprise solution that is
> not latest/greatest.  If you change the kernel,
> stuff starts breaking.
> 
> Example ... we have a bug report where the new ssh
> (which requires
> kernel auditing) doesn't properly list users with
> the "w" command.  Only
> people with this problem ... the ones not using the
> standard CentOS
> kernel.  Reason ... in this case the new kernel
> REQUIRES the audit and
> audit-lib packages to be installed ... which they
> don't have since they
> rolled their own kernel.
> 
> There are hundreds of packages added to the CentOS
> kernel by the
> upstream developers that are not in the kernel.org
> kernels ... everyone
> of those has a purpose to be there and many are
> required to make other
> parts of CentOS function.  You should NEVER change
> the kernel or glibc
> unless it is absolutely required.
> 
> WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND?
> 

What is hard to understand is if I take the same EXACT
kernel Centos take, which I assume is available, and I
compile everything Centos compiles in, except I
compile some hardware in the kernel rather than
modularize it (as Centos does), how exactly is that
going to break functionality?  How exactly is removing
ext2 (if it is included in Centos default compilation)
from the kernel is going to break Centos if I don't
ever use ext2?

ps...  At this point in the discussion it is not about
how to compile or why/why-not compile the kernel
anymore.  The how question is going to be solved.  If
you don't want to have a rational conversation about a
feature of any source-base package you don't have to
scream, all you have to say "It is the way it is,
because Centos says so, and if you don't like it,
don't use it."

If this is/was the wrong place to have this
conversation, my apologies.