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!
