On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Connie Sieh wrote:

> Only problem with changing the default kernel from the standard redhat is
> that many just want it to be standard redhat.  That is why we provide the
> alternate kernels in contrib.  Users who want default redhat get that and
> other users who want alternate kernels can install them if needed.

It would be nice if the xfs modules could be packaged as a separate rpm, 
and not as a whole new kernel. I wonder if this is possible without 
affecting the rest of the kernel?

> It is easy to make a site that has a alternate default kernel if you
> really need the alternate kernel as the default with out having to install
> it yourself.  Note that the installer does NOT know how to make xfs
> filesystems during the install.

Isn't it true that Fedora allows the "xfs" kernel boot line on the 
installer, which enables xfs filesystems? If so it may be simple to enable 
these options in SL.

See http://www.fedorafaq.org/#reiserjfs

>> As xfs is included in upstream 2.6 kernels, I would naively think that
>> enabling it would be fairly easy and would not clash with RedHat's
>> modifications. Is this a correct assumption?
>
> Have not tried it.  If you could try it and let us know if this is true
> or not that would be very useful.

Looking at the source rpms, it was very easy to get xfs, reiserfs and jfs 
filesystems to be built from the rpm. All I did was to add

CONFIG_XFS_FS=m
CONFIG_REISERFS_FS=m
CONFIG_JFS_FS=m

to the end of each of the kernel-*.config files in the source rpm. This 
made each of the file systems as modules.

If people are interested, they can get RPMS with xfs, reiser and jfs 
enabled here:

http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/~jss/data/rpms/

I've also rebuilt the utility packages from Fedora which allow fsck, and 
making the file systems (xfsprogs, reiserfs-utils and jfsutils).

Presumably building these as modules should not affect the rest of the 
kernel if they are unused, although the kernels haven't gone through QA... 
It would be nice if the modules could be built as kernel addon packages, 
though I don't know it this is possible yet.

Thanks

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Sanders <[log in to unmask]>   http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/~jss/
X-Ray Group, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK.
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