Novell Changes Enterprise Linux Kernel Mid-Stream

darthcamaro writes "Enterprise Linux kernels, from Red Hat or Novell, don't change version numbers inside of a release, right? While that has been the case for the last decade of Red Hat and Novell releases, Novell is breaking the mold with SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 service pack one. Instead of backporting new kernel features to the kernel they originally shipped with — which maintains software and hardware vendor certification — they've re-based their Linux kernel version altogether. '"There were some things that led us to update the kernel itself, which is something that we normally don't do: Neither SLES 9 or SLES 10 got a kernel update," Markus Rex, director of open platform solutions at Novell, told InternetNews.com. "But in this particular case, after deep discussion with our ISV and hardware vendors that gave us certifications, we felt in this case a kernel update was the appropriate step to take.'"

Funny, they couldn't figure out the old system

[H1pp13]

That's funny. I ran a SLES shop for 3 years and for the entire time, I had a request in to Novell to explain the minor numbering for their kernels in an attempt to keep EMC happy with updates. They put it off saying that they were trying to find a Linux Engineer there to explain. For 3 years!! I do not miss Novell. Not one bit.

Re:Good idea? Bad Idea?

[talcite]

I think the biggest surprise here is the update to Xen 4.

Xen 4.0 has barely been released for 3 months and they're moving to it for SLES? Insanity. There's barely any time to determine known bugs. What production environment would want to risk everything from downtime to data loss by using practically untested code?

That said, Xen 4.0 has some really nice features with regards to the Remus checkpointing project. It essentially provides instant failover (with persistent network connections) to commodity hardware. Definitely a feature to keep your eyes on for upcoming RHEL/SLES versions.

Re:outrageous!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://debian.org

bookmark this. now you never have to go through the agony of googling a bunch of stupid animal names again. think of what you can do with all that free time.

Fixed.

Re:Big jump

[twilightzero]

We're using SLES 11 on production servers with no problems. We decided to jump straight to 11 after getting burned for being 9.4 too long and nobody in the world supports it any more.

As far as VMware Tools support on SLES 11, according to VMWare's official documentation it is:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/osp_install_guide.pdf [vmware.com] start on page 18