[SLL] Cent OS 5 Update - Fails to boot

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tuesday 17 July 2007 01:11:00 am Francois Caen wrote:
> On 7/16/07, Glenn Stone <technoshaman at liawol.org> wrote:
> > So, what, the modules in the /updates/ directory are deliberately
> > versionless?
>
> No. It's the beauty of RH. Kernel versions never change within a RH
> release. RH backports drivers and other fixes in the same kernel.
> 2.6.18 in the case of RHEL/CentOS 5.

More specifically, we (I work for Red Hat, on the enterprise kernel team no 
less) work very hard to maintain a stable kernel abi for RHEL. We actually 
build some out-of-tree kernel module packages ourselves that don't have an 
explicit Requires: on a kernel N-V-R, but rather on specific kernel abi 
symbol checksums, which are (usually [1]) provided by all released kernels 
(some rpm-speak in there). So yes, a kernel module built for one RHEL5 kernel 
*should* work with any other RHEL5 kernel (assuming the same flavor and arch, 
of course, flavor being "standard", "xen", "PAE", etc).

[1] On very rare occasion, there's need to alter the kabi. But its done only 
with really REALLY good business justification and is strongly frowned upon.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com