On 1/30/08, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote: > nate wrote: > > Manish Kathuria wrote: > New features are typically not backported to > > current versions of the kernel, newer drivers are often back > > ported, assuming the driver existed in the RHEL kernel. If the > > driver did not exist then it's much less likely to get included. > > > >> For the lifetime of a distribution like RHEL 4 or RHEL 5, Red Hat > >> would stick to the same major and minor number of the kernel and would > >> just change release numbers. What is the relation, if any, between > >> the new kernels and the updates released by Red Hat ? > > > > They make their systems ABI compatible throughout the lifetime of > > the major version(4.x, 5.x). > > > > If your looking to stay on the leading edge with kernel updates your > > best off using another distro maybe Fedora or something. If your > > looking for a stable system that you don't have to worry about even > > if it means you have to be more careful about picking what hardware > > you run it on, RHEL and CentOS are good choices. > > > > You can always build your own kernels on RHEL/CentOS if you wanted, > > or rebuild Fedora kernels and install them on RHEL/CentOS, in most > > cases it should work. > > All the rest of what you said is true though ... drivers get backported > much more frequently than other features. In this connection, I have an example. I have a Netgear WG111 v2 USB Wireless Adapter which does not get detected by CentOS 5.1 updated with the latest 2.6.18 kernel released. This particular adapter has the Realtek 8187 chip. However, Fedora 8 running on 2.6.23 detects the adapter and also loads the correct module for it. This leaves me wondering whether the adapter will ever be supported by the current Cent OS 5.x kernel or the subsequent updates. Thanks, -- Manish Kathuria