Crazy idea

Dave Jones davej at redhat.com
Thu Mar 29 17:48:27 UTC 2007


On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 07:50:55PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
 > Hi all,
 > 
 > Reading the thread about adding support to the kernel spec file to build a 
 > vanilla kernel, I had this crazy (really crazy) idea:
 > 
 > Wouldn't it be great to share one kernel package or atleast one kernel source 
 > (as in pristine source + patches) between different distro's?
 > 
 > The kernel is a _very_ important and complicated piece of software, which 
 > requires many many eyes, I'm sure that many kernel bugs are hitting more then 
 > one distro, and some are fixed with distro specific patches in one distro, but 
 > not in the next.
 > 
 > So in an ideal word all distro's would have one kernel with a team made of the 
 > current maintainers from all distros  working on it. I know this is impossible 
 > taking the different rate of changes between distro's but maybe ubuntu + suse? 
 > + Fedora could use a common kernel source?

Not completely infeasible. Though there are differences in the choice of
CONFIG_ options between distros too.  Eg, Ubuntu are the only people
loopy enough to enable CONFIG_PREEMPT.  Other distros might need to
enable some backward compatibility options because their userspace isn't
up to date, etc, etc.

The actual patches we carry are rarely the cause the problems that get reported.
It's fairly uncommon for us to change drivers other than perhaps the
occasional compile fix which usually goes upstream quickly.  Yet that's
by far where most of the bugs that get reported are against.

Pretty much every time someone who files a Fedora kernel bug who then
builds their own vanilla kernel and it 'works', it's because they
chose different CONFIG options rather than the fact that it's vanilla.

 > As said a really crazy (as in probably undoable) idea. So if not this, then 
 > what can be done to work better together on the kernel side of distro's, maybe 
 > a distro-kernel-maintainers-list at kernel.org?

There is actually a kernel-packagers@ list already there, but it's really
low traffic.

 > And maybe also a common bugzilla?

http://bugme.osdl.org :-)

	Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk




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