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Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Issue 120

From Issue #120
April 2004

Apr 01, 2004  By Tim Burke
 in
Putting together a Linux distribution gets a lot more complicated when stacks of requirements start arriving from hardware vendors and other partners.
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Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 03/29/2004 - 03:00.

This is a comment addressed to RedHat ->
RH9 converted me from Windows because of its polished finish. Thank you.

Some advice: That was a confusing article title as I didn

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 04/02/2004 - 03:00.

Actually, there is a cheap version sold basically at media cost for academic users:

http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries/education/products/

WHAT about FEDORA?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 03/25/2004 - 03:00.

This article completley negates and ignores the fact that RHEL had RH9 (and in future Fedora Cora) to use as a base for testing as well.

The REAL open source community uses the community version - that's where it's proven. The enterprise hacks put it in a nice box.

Nice try to pull the wool over our eye LJ but we know better we're not WINDOZE users after all...

Re: WHAT about FEDORA?

dmarti's picture
Submitted by dmarti (not verified) on Thu, 04/01/2004 - 03:00.

How many Fedora users have 8-way SMP systems and 128 SCSI disks?

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 03/24/2004 - 03:00.

Wow, time travel! The article was posted on 4/1/2004 which is 8 days in the future as I enter this comment. I never knew Enterprise Linux was so powerful. :-)

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 03/22/2004 - 03:00.

Great marketing. A lot of blather for collecting other people's work.

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/01/2004 - 03:00.

Please look at a recent changelog at kernel.org and count the redhat.com addresses.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.4

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 04/02/2004 - 03:00.

Thats because RH doesn't go way out of its way to advertise about all the work we do upstream. For example, here's just a few of the big ticket items that come to mind:

- the whole new NPTL threading model
- rmap VM
- lvm2/device mapper
- O(1) scheduler
- ext3
- SATA subsystem
- ipv6, ipsec
- LSM
- PIE
- lots of network drivers

Plus a ton of misc fixes. This list is by no means comprehensive, as its just kernel stuff.

RH's gcc team (formerly Cygnus) is the heart of gcc.

A substantial portion of the GTK development crew is here.

Substantial contribution among the 1500 rpm packages.

Tally it up yourself. To me that looks like a lot more than just collecting up other people's work.

-Tim Burke

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 03/24/2004 - 03:00.

Nice troll. It succinctly demonstrates your lack of knowledge about software development, and product development.

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 03/17/2004 - 03:00.

Hmmm... I must have missed the part where removing support for ISA soundcards was a requested feature... They were supported in 2.1! Or adding a new, broken bindconf that still hasn't been fixed, though it's been out and broken for five months. Or even leaving out many, many *-devel rpm packages, such as sendmail-devel, which enables one to actually add and use milters with the milter-enabled base rpm.

If only the core bits got extensive testing, then that would explain why RHEL3 is worse than RHL9 from a "working-features" perspective.

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 04/02/2004 - 03:00.

Thats because the amount of possible work is almost infinite while the staff we have at RH is finite. Ultimately we do have to make some hard tradeoffs. We can't please all of the people all of the time. For example, we pour a lot of effort into new hardware support. Things like AMD64, sata, graphics cards, new storage and networking adapters, etc. So due to new stuff, the pile just gets bigger. Something has to give. This is why sometimes some things have to fall out the other end. ISA sound cards are 1 such example.

-Tim Burke

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 03/18/2004 - 03:00.

This is because the RH AS 3 is for enterprise use.
The only thing that need to work perfect is the core, and they need to work fast to compete with Solaris, Aix and HP-UX.
What is necessary is a stable and fast kernel with support for lots of mem, lots of disks, low latency, better threading to use in database and ERP softwares.
Sound cards and video cards is a secondary target.
In most part of datacenters, these machines are controled via console, and don't have video, mouse and keyboard.
In this scenario Red Hat AS 3 really do the job.

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 03/13/2004 - 03:00.

A truly herculean effort. It makes you wonder how long the RH internal developers can run at this pace?

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 03/11/2004 - 03:00.

Enjoyed reading it....
Well done...

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 03/11/2004 - 03:00.

Very nice article, indeed.

That gave me some really good arguments in the distro wars.

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 03/11/2004 - 03:00.

Whew! Thats alot of work.

Maybe now some people can understand why the RHL was not a worthwhile product for Redhat. Selling for peanuts somthing that is so friggin complicated.

Re: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 03/09/2004 - 03:00.

"Issue 120: Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3
Posted on Thursday, April 01, 2004 by Tim Burke"

Linux is cooler than I thought. Today is March 09, 2004 but this article wont be posted until April 01, 2004, which proves that Linux must have some kind of time machine built in.

Cool!

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