[Beowulf] Repenting for sins against Dell (on good Friday, no less)

[Nifty Tom Mitchell]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 09:00:12AM -0700, Skylar Thompson wrote:
> Chris Samuel wrote:
> > ----- "Skylar Thompson" <skylar at cs.earlham.edu> wrote:
> >   
> 
> Indeed. Using a distribution like RHEL mitigates this somewhat since
> RedHat seems to do a good job of keeping the kernel version the same and
> just back-porting patches non-disruptively. I have yet to see dkms fail
> when moving in a single major release of RHEL. If we do have to upgrade
> a major release, it's easier just to kickstart and start using dkms
> after the kickstart.

Caution:

In the past, RHEL Redhat has broken both API and ABI kernel interfaces 
but kept the major.minor kernel and RHEL number the same.   While they did it
for good reasons, hardware that is not supported out of the box
can break and you might have weeks or months to wait for a driver
update.   RHEL is full of backports and other patches-- your hardware vendor needs to 
stay dialed in and your site needs to double check updates as they surface
in the "test" area.




-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Found me a new hat, now what?