[asterisk-users] Centos kernel 34 vs. 42?

[Bryan J. Smith]

From:  Remco Barendse 
> Possibly, but I would have to start worrying about
> kernel configs, compiling the lot and solving the
> problem of the box no longer being able to boot the kernel :)

You'd be better off starting with a Fedora kernel.  Unfortunately RHEL/CentOS 4 is based on Fedora Core 3 which has been tagged legacy for quite some time now.  The last kernel version was around 2.6.13 or so IIRC.  And trying to go with a Fedora Core 5, 6 Test or Development (aka Rawhide) might not build because GCC has been upgraded to 4.0/4.1 from 3.4.

> I looked for CentOS repo's but cannot find one
> that will throw a plain vanilla kernel my way.

And you're not likely to find one.  RHEL/CentOS is based on a set kernel version with minimal changes, backporting required fixes/security updates only as necessary.  Red Hat's focus with RHEL is 7 years of SLAs with no ABI changes, period - unlike Fedora Core (or Red Hat Linux before it for that matter - which did co-exist with RHEL for 2 years before the trademark change).

> There's only a centos plus kernel but these are 
> basically the same as the original kernels just with
> some filesystems enabled.

As I hinted above, the changes are just significant enough that Red Hat only backports, to the anal power when it comes to RHEL.  And although  Fedora Core/Development would be a "good start" for an updated kernel (far vanilla where countless things would break), there is so much that has changed in the toolchain and user-space of Fedora Core 4-6 that offers a 2.6.16+ release that many people probably haven't bothered.  Especially since most people run RHEL/CentOS for its longevity and unchanging ABI/backports approach to an almost anal-level.