[NTLUG:Discuss] Commercial linux support options

[Bob Netherton]

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 19:55 -0500, David Stanaway wrote:

> How much of a pain are custom kernel builds in RHEL? 

Depends on what you mean by custom kernel.   If it's just a
matter of configuration settings, no different than other
distribution.  If it is installing drivers (which are usually
modules these days) or custom patching then things can get a
bit more interesting.  Red Hat will take fixes and features
from higher version kernels and backport them to the version
in their enterprise products if the feature/fix is important
enough.   That can get interesting at times.

Dropping in a kernel from kernel.org isn't really a good idea.
The Red Hat kernel errata exist for some reason other than to
keep folks busy :-)

> do roll your own kernels burn your support?

Pretty much.   So you keep the Red Hat supplied kernel around
and hope you can reproduce your problem.  If so, no harm no
foul.   If you can't reproduce it then you know sort of where
the problem lies.


Bob