Kernel numbers

Deron Meranda deron.meranda at gmail.com
Sat Jan 22 22:55:08 UTC 2005


On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:51:49 +0000, James Wilkinson
<james at westexe.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Jeff Stevens wrote:
> > What does it mean to see an rpm with a kernel of 2.6.10-1.741_FC3, when
> > we go to a site like http://www.kernel.org and see the latest kernel is
> > at 2.6.10?

James explained the basics pretty well.

For FC3's 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 in particular, if you download the source-RPM
(*.src.rpm) and install it, you'll see what's all included with Fedora's kernel
in the /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/ directory.  Specifically you'll find the
offical kernel files (as you would download from kernel.org),

-rw-rw-r--  1 root root 36533484 Dec 25 00:24 linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r--  1 root root   148560 Jan 13 15:24 patch-2.6.10-ac9.bz2

and about 64 separate patches (*.patch files).  The patch files usually
have names like "linux-n.n.n-description.path". For example, one of
them is called "linux-2.6.9-vm-pageout-throttling.patch".

This means that the patch was originally created against the 2.6.9 kernel
(and supposedly is still valid against the 2.6.10 kernel as well), but
for whatever reason has not been included in either Linus' branch or
in the -ac branch (at least as of -ac9).  Sometimes the patch will contain
comments at the top which explain it more (patches are just text files
so you can view them).

-- 
Deron Meranda




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