[elrepo] Announcement: EL7 kernel-lt Package Set Build Details

[Alan Bartlett]

>From the initial beginnings of the ELRepo Project's alternative kernel
availability with RHEL-5 there has been one consistent rule -- the
sources are used exactly as obtained from the Linux Kernel Archive.
[1]

Recently, with kernel-lt for EL7, there has been a problem with the
build of the perf subsystem. As of the linux-4.4.80 sources, the perf
subsystem failed to build. After some investigation, it was determined
that the root cause of the build failure had its origin in the update
of RHEL-7.3 to RHEL-7.4 and not the subsystem's code. A patch to
resolve the problem was developed and submitted to one of the relevant
maintainers of the tools/perf subsystem, along with the Linux Kernel
Mailing List. [2] Unfortunately there was no acknowledgement, no
discussion, nothing. It was totally ignored.

Having considered all possible options, we have decided to put aside
our rule regarding the kernel sources and to locally apply the patch
to the tools/perf source tree, thus allowing the perf subsystem to be
built. The first kernel-lt package set to be built with the patch
applied was kernel-lt-4.4.100-1.el7.elrepo [3]. The patch itself can
be found in the kernel/el7/PATCHES/ directory at any of our mirror
sites.

Thank you,

The ELRepo Team.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/11/194
[3] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2017-November/003915.html