Re: [tlug] Just curious... how much impact does a kernel update make?

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Dave M G wrote:
> Mattia,
>
> Thanks for responding.
>> In general upgrading the kernel to one of the same version is supposed
>> to improve stability, upgrading to a more recent version (say 2.6.28
>> when available) will introduce new functionalities and possibly remove
>> some old cruft.
> What would it take to go from 2.6 to 3.0?

Probably a change in the development model.  Before 2.6 the kernel was
split into a development 2.5 and stable 2.4 kernel.  This didn't work
very well because the major commercial vendors stopped serious 2.5
development (because no end users would want to run development kernels
in production systems).  This meant that for some things the 2.5 kernels
were actually behind the vendor forked 2.4 kernels.  With the change to
2.6 the 2.6.* kernels are released fairly regularly by Linus and they
are usually maintained with 2.6.*.* kernel releases until the next 2.6.*
kernel is released.  Vendors still fork 2.6 kernels but they seem to
make more effort to push their patches back into the Linus kernels.  The
new approach annoys people who have out of kernel drivers because
subsystems maintainers are less concerned about taking them into account
when making changes.

Edward