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November 13th, 2010

On RHEL5 kernel releases

You might have noticed that we have announced a new kernel branch named rhel5-testing a while ago (back in July, to be more specific). The idea is pretty simple: at the same time as giving the new kernel to our internal QA we are releasing it to rhel5-testing.

Although this change imposes some more work on me (more kernels to release, scripts to run, changelogs to prepare), I'm pleased to say that this model works very well. First, vendors who use our kernels as a base for theirs (for example, OWL) now enjoy earlier access to the sources. Second, new kernels get more testing coverage due to OpenVZ users who choose to use this branch. Finally, it works as a “technology preview”.

Now, let me explain why we have so strange version numbers in the recent rhel5-testing kernels — kernels 028stab07x are intermixed with 028stab070.y. The thing is, we still keep updating 028stab070.y with new fixes and upstream (RHEL) updates, while 028stab07x is a newer “sub-branch” which adds a few new features:

  • live migration of containers with NFS and AutoFS mounts
  • iotop working in containers and the host system

Because of these new features, these kernels haven't reached the stability yet so we keep releasing those in rhel5-testing. Hopefully soon it will end up being stable enough and we will abandon 028stab070.y in favor of 028stab078 (or so).

Update: this post was mostly written yesterday. Today we have just released 028stab078.1 kernel.

Update 7 Oct 2012: comments disabled due to spam

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