The Ksplice team is happy to announce
the public availability of one of our git repositories, RedPatch. RedPatch contains
the source for all of
the changes Red Hat makes
to their kernel, one commit per fix and we've published it on oss.oracle.com/git. With RedPatch, you can
access
the broken-out patches using git, browse them
online via gitweb, and freely redistribute
the source under
the terms
of
the GPL. This is
the same policy we provide for Oracle Linux and
the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK). Users can freely access
the
source, view
the commit logs and easily identify
the changes that are
relevant to their environments.
To understand why we've created this project we'll need a
little
history. In early 2011, Red
Hat changed how they released their kernel source, going from a
tarball that had individual patch files to shipping
the kernel source
as one giant tarball with a single patch for all Red Hat-introduced
changes. For most people who work in
the kernel this is merely an
inconvenience; driver developers and other out-of-kernel module
developers can see
the end result to make sure their module still
performs as expected.
For Ksplice, we build individual updates for each change and rely
on source patches that are broken-out, not a giant tarball. Otherwise,
we wouldn’t be able to take
the right patches to create individual
updates for each fix, and to skip over
the noise — like a change that
speeds up bootup — which is unnecessary for an already-running system.
We’ve been taking
the monolithic Red Hat patch tarball and breaking it
into smaller commits internally ever since they introduced this
change.
At Oracle, we feel everyone in
the Linux community can benefit from
the work we already do to get our jobs done, so now we’re sharing
these broken-out patches publicly. In addition to RedPatch,
the
complete source code for Oracle Linux and
the Oracle Unbreakable
Enterprise Kernel (UEK) is available from both ULN and our public yum server, including all
security errata.
Check out RedPatch and subscribe to
[email protected] for discussion about
the project.
Also, drop us a line and let us know how you're using RedPatch!
