Re: Re: [CentOS-devel] Too many kernels?

On Thursday 03 July 2008 12:07:07 pm Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > I start to think whether these kernels are indeed being all used to
> > the extend of justifying full kmdl support. Maybe it would make sense
> > to keep the full last series (2.6.18-92* above) and the highest one
> > from the series before (2.6.18-53.1.21.el5 and 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5).
>
> While Red Hat has promised initially a stable ABI within a version
> (including all updates), this was not always the case - or maybe it
> isn't clear to me what this promise means.

It isn't clear to you. :)

The ABI, as provided by the kABI whitelist, is guaranteed to remain stable.

> However, the breakages are 
> much more likely to occur when major updates (like RHEL 5.2) come
> while the minor kernel updates (like 2.6.18-53.1.19.el5) in between
> usually contain only security fixes (please note my usage of "usually"

For non-whitelisted interfaces, yes, this is usually true.

> :-)). So I find it very likely that a module version compiled for one
>
> -8.1.x kernel will work on all other -8.1.x kernels and less likely to
> work on a 53.1.x one.

If the module uses only whitelisted interfaces, it should work equally well 
across all RHEL5 kernels. If it doesn't... All bets are off.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx