But then we won't have so many upgrades in the kernel, and some of this upgrades are needed, because some of them are for bugs. What does Sun do when they found a bug in the kernel? They probably give their customers a kernel upgrade. The same can be said for Linux, but with more frequent upgrades. You have to choose, having stability in the kernel structures to have third party modules easy to deliver or having new features more frequently.
Sun produces a patch for a bug that doesn't break existing third party modules (and, usually, same is true for Linux). And it doesn't require you to recompile any third party modules after you install it. Sun kernel patches include the kernel core itself, and if bugs were in modules, it also includes the modules that need to be patched (for bugs, not for changes in kernel core).
As for the other issue, in production environment I'd choose stability over bleeding edge features anytime. Updating kernel on my home machine is one thing (if something gets screwed up, no web surfing for one afternoon, big deal). Updating tens or hundreds or thousands of production machines is something completely different. Anyhow, what I was aruging is that since SunOS is closed source, they were forced to do modularization of kernel "the right way". Linux being open source had freedom of not doing it the right way (well, from developers perspective it might be also called the right way, but not from the end-user's perspective). And Linux abused that freedom... So now, instead of just getting tcp_windows_trackign.c, compiling against linux26 kernel header files (that would be static for entire 2.6.x tree) and dropping resulting tcp_window_tracking.ko into /lib/kernel26/net/ipv4/netfilter (with kernel26 being shared by all 2.6.x kernels), I need to recompile and reinstall entire damn kernel. Not to mention downloading the entire kernel source that I really don't need...
In SunOS/Solaris world, Netfilter developers would be forced to use that approach/design. In Linux world they unfortunately had Linux source code available ;-)
The way it is now, I first need to discover to which kernel version I can actually apply tcp_window_tracking patch. Tried several, failed on all of them. At the end I just gave up, and am waiting for stable kernel that will have it already applied... Darn...
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
