[CentOS] Upgrading to 2.6.32

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 1 May 2010, maillists0 at gmail.com wrote:

> On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 4:37 PM, Akemi Yagi <amyagi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 1:28 PM,  <maillists0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I want to upgrade a 5.4 box with the 2.618 kernel to a shiny new 2.6.32
>>> kernel. Anyone done it? Is it possible? Are there gotcha's to watch out
>> for?
>>>
>>> Any advice is appreciated. A link to a decent howto would be awesome.
>>
>> You did not tell us why you want to run 2.6.32 on CentOS 5.4. I assume
>> you are aware of backporting and 2.6.18 is not the same as vanilla
>> kernel 2.6.18.
>>
>> Having said that, if you really, really need to run/build such a new
>> kernel, I advice you read through this CentOS forum thread in its
>> entirety:
>>
>>
>> https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?viewmode=flat&topic_id=23627&forum=37
>>
>
> Thanks, Akemi. I really want to try the fs-cache feature to make an nfs
> caching proxy. It would be a godsend.
>
> I was wondering whether the standard "make oldconfig" would work when making
> a version jump this large.  Are my drivers likely to break?

RHEL5 actually used to ship FS-Cache as part of their 2.6.18 kernel. You 
can find an interesting article on LWN about this:

 	http://lwn.net/Articles/312708/

It used to be a technology preview up to 5.2, but I think it disappeared 
in the release notes of 5.3. And there is a bugzilla entry on to why:

 	https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481579

Since FS-Cache was not mainlined, I think Red Hat ditched the idea of 
making it a supported option for the remaining 5 years of RHEL5. I guess 
testing with RHEL6 beta and then moving to CentOS 6 eventually is the 
safest option for production use.

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
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