Re: Bits from the kernel team

[Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 04:50:22PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 17:22 +0100, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Now that we have a 2.6.32 kernel in unstable, can you updates us
> > on the various things mentioned in this mail?
> > 
> > For instance, as I understand it, most other distro's recently
> > had a release with a 2.6.31 kernel?
> 
> Fedora 12, Ubuntu 9.10 and openSUSE 11.2 have this kernel version.
> 
> > Do you know if there are 
> > plans to have a kernel with backported drivers, one used by
> > multiple distributions?
> 
> I've not heard of a general plan for that.  However there is a
> compat-wireless project (covering Wifi and Bluetooth drivers) that I
> think Fedora and Ubuntu are pulling from.  That might be something we
> should do too.

For etch we had an Etch-And-A-Half kernel to add support for new
hardware.  Which also meant we had to upgrade some things because
the kernel has the habbit of breaking things.  I don't know if
there are simular plans for lenny?

Anyway what I would really like to see is a kernel that adds
support for more hardware and fixes bugs without any other changes.
I believe that 2.6.16.x was supposed to do that, but in the end
only contained bug fixes.   And they now seem to have various
versions for which they fix bugs.  But this doesn't solve our
problem that by the time we release our kernel is probably
outdated already for new hardware.  And this is about more than
just wifi and bluetooth.

I was hoping that various distributions could work together to
have long time support for 1 kernel version that adds new hardware
support.  Where that would be atleast some time after squeeze+1 is
released.  Since the other distro's used a 2.6.31 kernel recently,
and we seem to be going for 2.6.32(?), it seems unlikely that we
can get all to work on 1 such kernel version.  But maybe we should
look at what the "enterprise" versions will be using instead?


Kurt