On 11/30/06, M Harris <harrismh777@earthlink.net> wrote:
On Thursday 30 November 2006 13:47, Anders Johansson wrote:
Novell's head of kernel development is Greg Kroah-Hartman. Now we're getting someplace...
... this is what I am really getting at... and I genuinely am seeking knowledge; what does it mean to be head of kernel development at Novell? ... or anywhere else for that matter? (see Greg Freemyer's explanation)
Is the kernel that ships with Suse the "official" kernel that I can download from the official site unmodified <?> or, is it modified by kernel development at Novell? note: I am not asking whether the kernel has non gpl code at this point... only whether Novell kernel development modifies the official kernel before redistribution and redistributes it under the gpl license, or--- whether Novell modifies the kernel via the process Freemyer described?
And I have another question along the same lines... consider:
"Linux 2.6.15 consists of 18,811 files and 7,290,070 lines of code."
Folks, that's a lot of lines of code... what I want to know is how many of them were coded (patched) by Novell kernel development? What do those patches do? How many of those patches, or future patches, will M$ control behind the scenes... and if Freemyer's explanation is correct... how can we be sure that the "patches" that get through are *ok*. And I don't mean gpl vs non gpl... and I don't mean legal vs illegal... this is a control issue for me... I mean, controlled by M$ to provide degradation of performance, or a back-door, or anything else... that gets slipped by the watch-dogs on the Linus team----- *
If you look at the SUSE Kernel source RPM (or any other SUSE source RPM) you will see it has a few different sections. One big section is the vanilla kernel code. ie. Straight from www.kernel.org as released by Linus Torvalds. Then you will find another section that is just a bunch of patches. I have not looked recently, but in the pre-Novell days it was hundreds of patches. These are all patches that get applied to the vanilla source prior to it being compiled. None of those patches have been formally accepted into the vanilla kernel by Linus. This is typical of _every_ distribution. Particularily in 2004-2005 the vanilla kernel team never released any patches to released kernels, so if for instance 2.6.12 was found to have a bug then the vanilla kernel people would say "sorry not my problem, we will get the fixed in our next full release which will be 2.4.14". This practice made it mandatory for the distro people to accept and maintain patches for the kernels they had based a release upon. At some point in the last year, the kernel team assigned GregKH to be the stable kernel maintainer. (I may have that title wrong and this has nothing to do with Novell, except possibly he does this on company time). As such job is to track serious bugs in the released kernel and accept patches to it for formal release from www.kernel.org. So prior to today's release of 2.6.19, GregKH would have been solely responsible for accepting patches into the 2.6.18 series. So 2.6.19 just made the transition. Prior to its release today (or yesterday) it was under Linus Torvolds pervue. Now that it is released GregKH will handle any additional patches it gets and will handle point releases like 2.6.19.1 In addition to the above GregKH is the USB subsystem so for the about to begin 2.6.20 series of prerelease kernels all USB subsystem patches have to be submitted to him. He will collect them up and submit them to Linus in batches. It is a general rule that during the first 2 weeks after a full release feature enhancement patches will be accepted by Linus, then only bug-fix patches until the next full release. So for USB GregKH should have been collecting new feature enhancement patches for the last couple of months. He now has 2 weeks to submit those to Linus. At that point the "merge window" closes and Linus will only accept bugfix patches. Typically it takes a couple of months to get the next release stable, so 2.6.20 will likely be released about 2 1/2 months from now. FYI I don't know what GregKH's duties are at Novell and I didn't know he worked for them, but most of the core Linux Kernel team is employed in the Linux industry, so it is not much of a surprise that he does. Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org