Re: An interesting meeting with IBM

"Andrew Hamm" <ahamm@mail.com> writes: > Ronald Cole wrote: >> From where I sit, Red Hat forced the 2.6 kernel on everyone a year >> early, and IBM has been too slow in porting for it. > > Sounds to me like RH is to blame for supplying a dicky kernel that *can't* > be made to work properly... I never said that. Personally, I like NPTL. It's a posix-compliant and capable replacement for the not-quite-posix pthreads. So I guess it could be said that RH supplied a "dicky kernel" that *was* "made to work properly". But NPTL properly belongs in 2.6 because it is a change that is not fully backwards compatible with the non-posix pthread implementation! Red Hat's backporting NPTL to 2.4 broke a lot of apps that claimed to be able to run on 2.4 kernels. However, I thought that IBM would use the opportunity to make lemonade out of that lemon and have an IDS that would be ready for the release of RHEL3. It would seem that IBM needed more than a year of lead time to embrace such a change, however. And they haven't been upfront about why that is. Maybe it's all Red Hat's fault because the NPTL backport was buggy and IBM is just not saying anything because they don't have anything nice to say. Or it could be that IBM just wasn't paying close attention to what Red Hat was doing. Perhaps it's a little of both. Impossible to tell. But the end result is definitely a situation that is *much* less than desirable. -- Forte International, P.O. Box 1412, Ridgecrest, CA 93556-1412 Ronald Cole <ronald@forte-intl.com> Phone: (760) 499-9142 President, CEO Fax: (760) 499-9152 My GPG fingerprint: C3AF 4BE9 BEA6 F1C2 B084 4A88 8851 E6C8 69E3 B00B