Re: Debian or vanilla kernel - best of both worlds possible?
On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 05:29:30PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 03:06:07PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> > - However, Debian's new policy is to remove non-free parts of the
> > kernel.
>
> s/of the kernel//. But AFAICS there's been an exception granted for
> sarge, so maybe we can add the firmware back except for those two cases
> where the firmware license conflicts with the general kernel license.
Yes, but I am talking about the general future.
> > - Kernel Upstream has basically abandoned the end user by declaring
> > that the 2.6 kernels being released on kernel.org are not the most
> > stable kernels, and that building kernels for use on production
> > systems should be the distribution's job.
>
> That's bullshit. Upstream kernels are fine for the end user, they are
> not fine and never were for the 1% or less of ultra-extrem enterprise
> user that want a tested in all possible variants, certified and changed
> as little as possible kernel.
You are aware that the upstream maintainers announced a change in
their release management on kernel summit?
> > The good news is that the Debian patch only creates files in debian/,
> > which will make it apply cleanly even to vanilla kernel sources. Is it
> > planned (documented as a committment of the kernel team) that this
> > will stay that way? If yes, one could check out the Debian
> > subdirectory without checking out the "real" kernel, which would
> > greatly help in reducing download volume.
>
> Yes, it's our plan to keep it that way.
Very good.
> > Additional good news is that you guys use dpatch to actually change
> > the kernel source. Do I see correctly that for example
> > drivers-net-tg3-readd.dpatch was created because the .orig.tar.gz
> > already had tg3 removed?
>
> Yes, but that's probably going to change a little for the 2.6.8-based
> kernel (Jens wrote a sed snipplet to just remove the firmware images
> from tg3.c)
Yes, I am aware of that.
> All patches have some comments like:
>
> ## DP: Description: Add 3ware 9xxx SATA-RAID driver
> ## DP: Patch author: Adam Radford <linuxraid@amcc.com>
> ## DP: Upstream status: merged after 2.6.7
>
> or
>
> ## DP: Description: chown permission check fix for ATTR_GID
> ## DP: Patch author: Chris Wright
> ## DP: Upstream status: backport
Yeah, but some people (including me) might not be able to judge the
impact of a patch from these rather terse comments. For example, is
Chris Wright's patch close a local root privilege escalation
possibility, or does it only fix a "does not build" on mipsel? The
comments are way too terse for somebody not following lkml, bugtraq
and other discussion media be able to judge whether the patch is
locally useful or not.
Greetings
Marc
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Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
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