Red Hat Stops Shipping Kernel Changes as Patches 184
mvar writes to point out a report from h-online about the Red Hat
kernel source controversy. From the article: "Red Hat has changed
the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it
was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which
could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat
used. Now though, the company ships
a tarball of the source code with the patches already
applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and
LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage
Red Hat's source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Although
targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for
distributions such as CentOS."
Incorrect news is incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)
"Although targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for distributions such as CentOS."
That's not what CENTOS says.
"This description is accurate. However, as pointed out multiple times by now, it does not affect rebuilding of the kernel itself. The CentOS kernel is just a rebuild, so there is no problem there. In the case of the centosplus kernel, because it may add patches, some extra steps might be needed. But again, that is not a major issue."
https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=29147&start=280
diff(1) (Score:5, Informative)
$ tar xzvf linux-2.6.nn.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf linux-redhat-2.6.nn-02.tar.gz
$ diff -Naur linux-2.6.nn linux-2.6.nn-02 > redhat-02.patch
$ diff -U redhat-01.patch redhat-02.patch | more
Re:I don't see the problem (Score:3, Informative)
You can obviously find out the overall difference, but now Red Hat no longer provides either a git tree or split-out patches for each change, which makes it harder to figure out what individual changes they've made to the kernel.
Re:CentOS (Score:5, Informative)
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/07/11/04/1331247/Is-CentOS-Hurting-Red-Hat [slashdot.org]
""I'm pretty sure RedHat hate CentOS."
1. No, we don't. At least, not most of us -- because most of us actually *understand* the business we're in. That's why we're making all this nice money. If we did hate CentOS, we could make it awfully difficult for them in any number of ways -- delaying updates, hiding marks and making them play "where's Waldo" every release, that sort of thing.
2. The "coy mumbo jumbo" about the upstream vendor has to do with trademark protection, not hate. We don't want "Red Hat" to turn into "Kleenex".
3. Here's a question: why is there no CentOS equivalent based on SuSE products? Think about it.
4. A lot of the significant people in the CentOS community are actually important and respected members of the Fedora community as well. That way, Red Hat benefits from the work of the more savvy CentOS users. That's how open source works, you see.
"
Re:CentOS Impact? (Score:4, Informative)
Wont CentOS simply compile the pre-patched source from the tarball and be good to go?
Yes, CentOS will be fine. There's been some interesting discussion on the CentOS-devel list lately about how CentOS is positioning itself w/r/t Redhat. They're reluctant to share an automated build process with the community (so the process can be independently verified) because that would help Redhat's competition (seemingly Oracle). The trouble is, it also slows progress (no CentOS 6 builds yet) and makes forks difficult (something that ought to be encouraged, if needed, in the Open Source ethos).
The CentOS team does awesome work, but it's a tricky situation they're in.
Re:CentOS Impact? (Score:5, Informative)
The Oracle improvements, for the most part, are actually kernel level modules and services that provide the required functionality to facilitate their database clusters. They basically provide the inter-node communication and shared block access management services among other things.
I'm a long-time Oracle DBA, and could care less about this little war. I just know that it pays the bills.