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.'"

Comments

outrageous!

[nomadic]

This is unconscionable and fills me with deep, passionate rage. I can't believe a company followed a nonstandard numbering convention for one of their releases. That's the most evil think I've ever heard and it heralds the downfall of modern society.

Good idea? Bad Idea?

[bernywork]

The biggest reason why everyone froze their kernels for a major release and back ported was the create what was effectively a driver binary interface. So if a hardware vendor (Yes, I'm looking at you Nvidia) wanted to create a binary driver release for a codebase, that driver release would work for the whole period of support for that codebase. This is because Linux doesn't have a driver ABI.

So getting back to what Novell have done here...It's a hard one, I guess, if they spoke to their ISVs and they said they don't care, then it doesn't matter. If HP / Dell / Lenovo don't care either then, again, that's no problem.

I guess there is always going to be someone out there who hasn't qualified their drivers with Novell for SLES 11 and just does self certification and was expecting their release to keep working (Which was tested against the earlier release) and now has to upgrade their driver because the Linux ABI is a rapidly moving target. On the other hand, a lot of people rely on on Novell / RedHat etc for driver support and don't go back to Dell / HP / Lenovo; if there is problems they point fingers at their Linux vendor first.

Time will tell if this was a good idea or not. Personally, I'm not against it, more hardware support out of the box is better for me, if I run into a problem and have to run older hardware on an older kernel and just upgrade RPMs on my older systems then so be it. I guess that's what versioning in builds is for really isn't it?

Berny