[CentOS] newbie kernel question

Sat Apr 1 21:16:16 UTC 2006
William L. Maltby <BillsCentOS at triad.rr.com>

On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 15:59 -0500, Nick Smith wrote:
> cant i just recompile the kernel with reiserfs support? where is the
> documentation for recompiling the kernel? i can enable it myself, i
> dont need a special kernel do i? ive never had to have one for any
> other distro, if i can get the kernel source i should be able to just
> "make menuconfig" and turn on what i want right?  why do i have to go
> into unsupported territory to get a kernel with the support i need? is
> this just the RH/CentOS way? sorry for all the stupid questions ive
> just never used a RH type distro before.

Short version: you can do everything you want to do. But you have to
operate in the environment of RH setups and the does bring some
differences.

But the real stopper is the difference in underlying philosophy: CentOS
is "enterprise oriented". This means it is not designed to make
customization of every bell and whistle easy, but is designed to provide
maximum stability, reliability, upgradeabiliy and maintainability.

This means that CentOS espouses and supports things oriented to
minimizing end-user (admin) induced problems. Upgrades by rpm and yum is
one leg of that. Offering a "non-standard" kernel is another leg. You
see, if you modify your copy and then another upgrade to kernel comes
out, your changes may be happily overwritten.

You can avoid this by doing your upgrades and then never taking an
automatic upgrade again (for the kernel only? Or are other things which
might depend on some kernel facility also affected?).

It's really easy to do it the CentOS way. The hard part is convincing
yourself that it's worth the effort when you can "do what I always did"
and not have to learn.

MHO, HTH
Bill

> <snip>

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