Future evolution of the Kernel policy ?

[Sébastien Munch <sebastien.munch@adelux.fr>]

Hello !

I'm Sebastien Munch, from Adelux, a free software services company in France. 
We remotely manage Debian servers for our customers. We work much on newer 
hardware, especially IBM servers.

With Woody and Linux 2.4.18, we were forced to abandon Debian kernels because 
Debian didn't support newer hardware. We had to use home-made installation 
procedures because the standard procedure wasn't able to detect hard disks or 
network interfaces.

We would like to know what will be Debian's policy about new kernels and 
drivers : will newer hardware be supported or not ?

For the future of our servers, we have 3 choices:
- use the Debian kernels
- prepare ourselves to apply patches on the Debian kernel, when it will be 
necessary
- use home-made kernels, never use Debian's ones

The choice we will do depends on the following points:

- Will new drivers be backported if using always the same kernel version ?
- Or will Debian totally change its policy and use different kernel versions ?
- Will the installation procedure evolve to support new hardware as it 
appears ?

Thanks a lot for any help.

-- 
Sebastien Munch
Linux and free software engineer
Adelux