[OpenAFS] OpenAFS & Linux kernel 2.6: please have a trackable bug report / task ?

[Russ Allbery]

Holger Brueckner <lists@net-labs.de> writes:

> i never would have though that so many large installations don't use
> custom kernels. i know that software distribution is a lot of work but i
> would have thought that all of you having large scale installation have
> their own redhat/debian/suse/whatever mirror to distribute pakets. then
> exchanging the default kernel with a modified one would not be too
> difficult.

Building and testing a new kernel that works across all different hardware
platforms and then keeping up with security patches and new hardware
drivers is a lot of work.  Why go to all that work when a distribution
does it for me?

I build my own (stock) kernels on my personal systems, but when you're
talking about 400 servers with widely varying hardware, I'd rather use a
vendor kernel that's already been tested in that sort of environment.

One of the main points of free software is to avoid unnecessary
duplication of effort.

> what will you all do if your distributions will switch their default
> kernel to 2.6 ?

Use a sane distribution that doesn't jam a particular kernel version down
my throat?  Debian stable currently has a choice of 2.2 or 2.4.  I expect
the next Debian stable will have a choice of 2.4 or 2.6.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>