Clearing up some misconceptions on Arch’s kernel26-lts

Nepherte — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:36:08 +0000

I’ve read numerous misconceptions on Arch Linux’ new kernel package, especially on the UbuntuForums, which I’m about to clear up rightaway. Everyone seems to think they’re dumping the latest kernel for the “stable ubuntu kernel”, also implying the current kernel is unstable. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

To begin with, they’re not replacing the current kernel (2.6.31.5). They’re only adding an extra kernel to the repositories. Why? Because they want to give users a second choice for the kernel package that suits better in certain situations (servers in particular) and because it can server as a fallback kernel when something is wrong with the primary one.

Second, it’s not “ubuntu’s kernel” they’re adding, it’s the officially supported long time support (lts) kernel from kernel.org, which is currently at version 2.6.27.31. Perhaps they think it’s ubuntu’s because of the term lts, something canonical uses itself, but obviously the term already existed long time before canonical introduced it for their os. This lts kernel that Arch Linux is about to add, doesn’t use any of ubuntu’s patches either as you can see in the pkgbuild for kernel26-lts:

# Maintainer: Andreas Radke 
 
pkgname=kernel26-lts
_kernelname=${pkgname#kernel26}
_basekernel=2.6.27
pkgver=${_basekernel}.31
pkgrel=2
pkgdesc="The Linux Kernel and modules - stable longtime supported kernel package suitable for servers"
arch=('i686' 'x86_64')
license=('GPL2')
url="http://www.kernel.org"
backup=(etc/mkinitcpio.d/${pkgname}.preset)
depends=('coreutils' 'kernel26-firmware>=2.6.27' 'module-init-tools' 'mkinitcpio>=0.5.20')
install=${pkgname}.install
source=(ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-$_basekernel.tar.bz2
        ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-$pkgver.bz2
	# the main kernel config files
        config config.x86_64
        # standard config files for mkinitcpio ramdisk
        ${pkgname}.preset
	# ext4 patches from Fedora
	#http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/kernel/F-10/?pathrev=kernel-2_6_27_29-170_2_79_fc10
	linux-2.6.27-ext4-rename-ext4dev-to-ext4.patch
	linux-2.6.27.9-ext4-cap-check-delay.patch)
md5sums=('b3e78977aa79d3754cb7f8143d7ddabd'
         'adfb289efee5dce61e532678317c0b4c'
         '04ed4c213100a20056dc8180a8bc7627'
         '2d90dc4f3541c7fdbc2802b7c6be7bdc'
         'a13338958d1b241f8dfd4c6014cad3d4'
         '659953c9c437d311bf93eff505ef8e67'
         '8cd12e9727d9221aacfa52ad9b9a42f9')
 
build() {
...
}

The only 2 patches they use are from the fedora project to backport the ext4 filesystem, which was only introduced after kernel 2.6.27.x.

And last but not least, the current kernel (which remains the main kernel for Arch Linux by the way) is considered stable, as indicated on the official kernel.org site.

Nepherte (dot) be » Long Term Support

Clearing up some misconceptions on Arch’s kernel26-lts