[elrepo] How to understand elrepo kernel config changes

[Phil Perry]

On 05/08/2019 03:55, Chengwei Yang wrote:
> Hi Phil,
> 
> I found a problem here.
> 
> I'm testing kernel-lt 4.4.186-1 on a 2socket skylake server with X722 rev09 ethernet network connection.
> 
> I fount that the i40e driver version is 1.3.46-k which doesn't support X722
> device while centos 7.4's latest kernel 3.10.0-693.21.1 does.
> 
> Because I'm new to kernel and now I'm worrying there are some other traps like
> this to use kernel-lt.
> 

Hi Chengwei,

Kernel-lt is now quite old at version 4.4.x. Conversely, the distro 
kernel, although it may have started out as a 3.10 kernel, is constantly 
updated by Red Hat and newer drivers (and security and bug fixes) are 
backported all the time. In this case it would appear that the distro 
kernel is actually in better shape wrt that ethernet driver than 
kernel-lt. To answer your question, yes there will be other areas where 
the distro kernel is effectively "newer" than kernel-lt but I can not 
answer if they will be areas that affect you personally.

If this is the case then kernel-lt may not be for you. Why are you not 
able to stick with the distro kernel? It may be easier to fix any issues 
you have with the distro kernel.

Hope that helps,

Phil