"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Kernel Patches and Change Logs

From John Covici on Sun, 11 Jul 1999

Hi. I found your link at linuxhq.com and I would like to ask a question to which I have not been able to get an answer after much looking.

Where can I look at changelogs for recent kernels (2.3.x and maybe 2.2.x)? I looked in the patches themselves, at linuxhq.com, at freshmeat.net (which has so much that I may not have completely searched it) and Linux Documentation Project.

I hope you can answer me individually -- thanks so much for your help.

John Covici

The Linux kernel changelogs are rather informally maintained. Brief summaries can be found at:

Cutting Edge:

http://edge.kernelnotes.org

... while more detailed information can be found in the patches themselves. There is a "Patch Browser" which allows you to preview the diffs (patches) using a web browser. This is obviously only useful for glancing through the list, guesstimating the impact of the changes based on the various sizes of various patch files to various files, and or reading the changes to the various README, CHANGES, and Documentation/* files.

The Patch Browser can be found at:

http://www.kernelnotes.org (sort of formerly http://www.linuxhq.com)

For unofficial (non-mainstream) patches the best site I've found is:

The Linux Kernel Patch Archive

http://linux-patches.rock-projects.com

Rock Projects seems to have their own Linux distribution available:

http://linux.rock-projects.com

This seems to be in beta --- and it seems to be targeted to very techie users. If you're the sort of person that takes a FreeBSD installation, changes to the /ports directory and types: 'make world' than this might be the Linux distribution for you. You can download all 200Mb of this, or send the author $8 U.S. and he'll send you a CD. (Note: actually it seems he'll use the Australian equivalent of C.O.D. if you're in a place where that's possible for him, which apparently doesn't include the U.S.).

Naturally you can learn more about Rock Projects at their master web site: http://www.rock-projects.com (He seems to like using lots of "hostnames" as psuedo-URLs --- I'm guessing these are mostly virtual hosted off of one system).

There used to be a nice collection of unofficial patches at:

Linux Mama

http://www.linuxmama.com

However, this seems to have fallen into decay. Apparently Kurt Hewig (the original maintainer of Linux Mama) got busy with other matters and no longer has time for these. The old patches are still there. They just haven't been updated in about a year.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 44 August 1999

HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Starshine Techinical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

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