Re: How much patching?

On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Barry K. Nathan wrote:

>Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 14:04:38 -0700
>From: Barry K. Nathan <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>List-Id: Discussion of the Red Hat Linux 'Limbo' beta
>    <limbo-list.redhat.com>
>Subject: Re: How much patching?
>
>On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 10:24:32AM -0500, Ed Wilts wrote:
>>   I believe the only distributor that provides an upatched kernel is
>> Slackware.
>
>I believe Debian does as well, and while Mandrake's default kernel is
>patched, they also provide RPM packages for unpatched kernels.

I don't believe any popular mainstream Linux distribution ships a
kernel that is unpatched.  The stock kernels are a good baseline
generally, but they're definitely not perfect.  Red Hat, and most
if not all other Linux distributors patch the stock Linus kernels
with various bug fixes, stability patches, per-architecture
patches that never made it into Linus's stock kernel yet,
performance tuning, and selected other items.


-- 
Mike A. Harris		ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer
XFree86 maintainer
Red Hat Inc.