[WBEL-users] Kernel 2.6

[Phil Schaffner]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 07:48, Hedemark, Magnus wrote:
> Terrence Martin [mailto:tmartin@physics.ucsd.edu] asks:
> 
> > Has anyone deployed kernel 2.6.x on WBEL?
> 
> Specifically?  Not that I'm aware.  But there are some using it on RHEL so
> it should work.  There is a Red Hat employee who has RPM's on their personal
> web space if you wish to try it (try googling for it... I don't have it
> bookmarked).
> 
> There isn't a whole lot of incentive, though, as many of the nicer features
> of 2.6 have been backported by Red Hat into their 2.4 tree.

Haven't tried 2.6 on WBEL, but have it on FC1.  The yum.conf entry for
the Red Hat guy is:

[2.6testkernels]
name=Test Linux 2.6-test prerelease kernels for RHL9/rawhide
baseurl=http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.6/


You will need to check out some of the the other packages in the
repository, such as modutils and mkinitrd, and upgrade as required as
well.

I wouldn't try this on a machine you need to depend on.  Had some
trouble getting sound again after the upgrade, and have yet to get Cisco
VPN or VMware to work, although others have reported success there. 
Also got bitten by the lack of built-in reiserfs support - it's in the
kernel-unsupported-modules package.  I like to have an alternate
bootable backup copy of the OS installed as well.  Good luck on the
bleeding edge if you go for it.

Alternatively, may want to look at the Fedora development stuff:

[development]
name=Fedora Core 2 development
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://mirror.hiwaay.net/redhat/fedora/linux/core/development
	http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/development
	http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development

> There isn't a whole lot of incentive, though, as many of the nicer features
> of 2.6 have been backported by Red Hat into their 2.4 tree.

Many, but the "real" 2.6 is still reported to have some substantial
performance advantages.  Haven't seen (or tried) benchmarks yet.

Phil