Re: Future evolution of the Kernel policy ?
On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 01:32:44PM +0100, Sébastien Munch wrote:
> 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.
It is the general policy of the kernel team to stick to an kernel
release and only provide bug fixes on top of that. We don't generally
add in new drivers, or backports. Certainly not once a distribution
(e.g. Woody) has been released.
So if you have hardware that is not supported by Woody (or Sarge for
that matter) then that situation is not likely to change. Not
for official kernels anyway.
That leaves you with patching the Debian kernel, or using your own.
Its really up to you. The Debian kernels try to keep on top
of security updates, though currently the main efforts are
for sarge and woody has been left in the cold a bit.
--
Horms
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