On Sat, 2004-07-24 at 13:39 -0500, Michael Satterwhite wrote:
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This may be a bit on the philosophical side (well, for geeks like me at least), but...
I know that SuSE - and for that matter almost all distributors - modifies the kernel that is distributed. The question then becomes: why?
To add features they feel are beneficial to their customers but that haven't been accepted into the mainline kernel yet. SuSE employs some kernel hackers, such as Andrea Arcangeli. In SuSE's version of 2.6 we get, for example, his version of a virtual memory manager. There is also a number of other patches, in the 2.4 kernel it was several thousand, I don't know what the number is at present in 2.6, for various little things, boot logging before the log daemon has started, the boot splash image, and lots more. Note also that in the new scheme for the kernel.org kernels, the distributor kernels will be the only ones tagged "stable". AIUI, kernel.org will be going into a permanent state of development from now on, making life difficult for those who run the so-called "vanilla" kernels