> If this is the case then indeed RH kernels could be better than vanilla. There's one issue you forgot: there have been dozens and dozens of "vanilla" kernel releases in the 2.4 series (for example). 2.4.0 through 2.4.19, various sorts of -aa, -ac, and other sorts of big patches meant to solve various problems in those various official versions. If you read the linux- kernel mailing list (watch out, hundreds of posts per day) you'll see all those various versions being announced, and some of them later denounced. Now, which is better, taking some Redhat kernel that came, say, with Redhat 7.2 (or one of its updates), or randomly selecting the latest kernel at that time, say 2.4.13? Well, the truth is that many of the 2.4.* early kerels were duds, with serious problems (e.g., filesystem corruption, serious VM issues under high load, etc.); Redhat had to choose the more stable of the bunch to ship to their customers. Even if they didn't include any extra fixes in their kernels, the mere fact that they tried to make sure that they are shipping the more-stable kernels of the series was important. At least for people that don't have the resources to check a dozen kernels to see which one fairs best on a very specific type of high load - in other words, most of the members of this list. Anyway, as Ariel later explained, he *is* trying to see which kernel fairs best for a specific workload - in which case he is probably right, Redhat's checking and patching might not be at all relevant to his needs, because he might be able to do it better for his very specific needs. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Sep 26 2002, 21 Tishri 5763 People, please, when you trash Red-Hat in this list, please at least specify what kind of experience you have with them. People have been saying things here that are in *COMPLETE* contradiction to my 5-year experience with various versions of Redhat. I suspect that some of the people trashing Red- Hat are not actually using it, and are just assuming things. In the last couple of years I've been using Redhat 7.* extensively both at home and at work. I've never encountered any problems with gcc 2.96 (certainly not with the Redhat 7.1 and later versions), but its greatly improved C++ support and other improvements over 2.95 were important to me. In all this time, I only encountered one "buggy" Redhat kernel, and that bug wasn't all that serious (reiserfs filesystems could not be umounted). In fact, I found Redhat's kernels to be very stable. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Sep 26 2002, 20 Tishri 5763 Over the last week, we've seen here a barrage of postings trashing Redhat. Everything from their choice of C compiler, choice of KDE/ Gnome customization, and now kernels. Some of the people saying those things (I never said all of them!) are not speaking from experience because they usually use a different distribution. All of them (including you, Ariel) were generalizing (I didn't realize you meant that Redhat's kernel was un-stable only on a specific sort of heavy-duty server with high VM load, I thought you were saying it was generally unstable). I just thought that this sort of defamation was unfair, and can bring a newbie reading this not to choose Redhat because "I read on linux-il that its C compiler doesn't work, their desktop interface is broken and their kernel sucks". From my experience with Redhat and their packages, for everything from a development workstation to a gigabit-throughput web server, Redhat, while not without any fault, is a good, reliable system for most uses that most readers of this list will want. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Sep 26 2002, 21 Tishri 5763