[CentOS] What RH-like on a Dell XPS 15 (9590)?

[Lamar Owen]

On 07/27/2017 04:16 PM, wwp wrote:
> ...
> It is as simple as unknown hardware at boot up, it's a well known issue
> w/ *Lake hardware (modern hardware) that kernel 3.x cannot handle.
> CentOS7 has a kernel which is simply not modern, unable to handle lots
> of computers sold currently.
>
> That said, there might be a way to boot, but nothing trivial and
> nothing at all I could find on the Internet, everytime it's kernel
> 4.3/4.10 minimum required.
...

While I know that Johnny has provided the experimental kernel (thanks, 
Johnny) I would like to just briefly address this idea that the C7 
kernel is 'obviously' not going to work because 'is 3.x and must have 4.x.'

In EL-land, kernel versions are effectively meaningless, since features, 
hardware support, bugfixes, security fixes, etc are back-ported into the 
'old and not modern' 3.10 kernel (for EL7) by competent developers at 
Red Hat.  An EL 3.10 kernel, such as the current 
3.10.0-514.26.2.el7.x86_64 one, may have hardware support back-ported 
from a 4.x kernel that doesn't exist in the vanilla kernel.org kernel 
(I'm almost certain it does, but I'm not going to take the time to get 
details).

So it is very possible that full hardware support for your hardware 
could show up in a 3.10 kernel (in fact, I would expect that this would 
happen, but it might not happen quickly).  As you found out, 
experimental kernels and non-distribution kernels can freak out software 
packages, such as VMware Workstation, that only work with certain 
kernels and are expecting a particular kernel version and ABI for EL7.  
I've tried out a few non-standard kernels before, and if you rely on 
packages that depend upon the distribution default kernel version (as I 
do with kmod-nvidia from ELrepo!) that breakage can be swift, and can 
derail you in a hurry, causing you to go down a rabbit hole very 
quickly.  So be prepared and keep your eyes open for these issues.

In some circles, the back-porting of features into old kernels is 
controversial; but that is a business decision made as part of the EL 
development and is not likely to change any time soon.  YMMV.