On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:51:49 +0000, James Wilkinson james@westexe.demon.co.uk wrote:
Jeff Stevens wrote:
What does it mean to see an rpm with a kernel of 2.6.10-1.741_FC3, when we go to a site like http://www.kernel.org and see the latest kernel is at 2.6.10?
James explained the basics pretty well.
For FC3's 2.6.10-1.741_FC3 in particular, if you download the source-RPM (*.src.rpm) and install it, you'll see what's all included with Fedora's kernel in the /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/ directory. Specifically you'll find the offical kernel files (as you would download from kernel.org),
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 36533484 Dec 25 00:24 linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2 -rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 148560 Jan 13 15:24 patch-2.6.10-ac9.bz2
and about 64 separate patches (*.patch files). The patch files usually have names like "linux-n.n.n-description.path". For example, one of them is called "linux-2.6.9-vm-pageout-throttling.patch".
This means that the patch was originally created against the 2.6.9 kernel (and supposedly is still valid against the 2.6.10 kernel as well), but for whatever reason has not been included in either Linus' branch or in the -ac branch (at least as of -ac9). Sometimes the patch will contain comments at the top which explain it more (patches are just text files so you can view them).