Re: [Sheflug] RAID and kernel upgrading.

[Will Newton <nospam [at] misconception.org.uk>]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> >From what I've heard, 2.4.0-pre is stable only with Red Hat-supported
> hardware.  Older Sparcs, many Alphas, Amigas, Macs, are typically
> shit-out-of-luck.

<RANT>
The kernel has exactly bugger all to do with RedHat. Tell it to Mulder &
Scully. I'm sorry to sound like that, but RH supports alpha, sparc and
i386 in it's main distro tree. They also have done a lot of work on the
kernel and on Linux software in general. Look at Alan "RedHat" Cox's
changelogs and tell me that is all RedHat-centric work.
Red Hat are NOT the evil demons of Linux, and at least all their install
tools are open source. 
I'm just sick of people demonising RedHat because 90% of people started
out with RedHat and now they see themselves as "above" it. It's a decent
distro, it has it's flaws, but so do most distros (e.g. I wouldn't give
anyone 2p for Mandrake 7).
RedHat are not evil and any kernel problems are likely nothing to do with
them.
</RANT>

> I can verify that for Sparc ELC, with -pre1 I think it was.
> 
> People whose opinions I respect say that the quality of the kernel
> code is _way_ off compared to a couple of years ago, and many think
> that's because there are too many people working on the Linux kernel
> who do so primarily for money.
> 
> Welcome to the Big Time.

Hmmm, "people you respect" sounds like "bloke in the pub" to me.
If you'd contributed considerable code to the kernel I could maybe see why
you were criticising the folks on l-k, but Linus and Alan have been there
all the way and are still two of the major contributors. The premise of
open source software is that the more contributors, the better the code.
The dev. kernels have been very "alpha" recently, but if it stabilizes OK
I will have no complaints. There have been many new additions to the
kernel since the early days (PCMCIA, ISDN, USB, video, I2C, I2O, etc.).
The difference between those paid to work on the kernel and others is some
do actually do something and not sit on their arses and whinge.

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