[TriLUG] Fedora, RHEL, and drivers

[Kevin Sonney]

Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 09:00:48 -0500
Message-ID: <m3oevqvrsf.fsf at moltress.darkcanvas.com>

[Full disclosure: I work at Red Hat as a Sales engineer.]

Brian Daniels <bitmage at bellsouth.net> writes:
> Where are driver vendors and app developers supposed to focus?  If I go to 
> Fedora, should I expect my Nvidia drivers to be kept up-to-date?  Will 
> vmware still work?  Or will these vendors only focus on the official 
> slow-moving target of RHEL?

We hope developers will continue to have a presence with Fedora, but
also want them to focus on RHEL. And to be honest, of the vendors I work
with, they're all much happier with the RHEL model. RHEL isn't a moving
target, like RHL has been several times in the past. With the ABI and
API stability we put into RHEL (that is, no changes to Binary or API
comptability unless there's no other option), once the driver compiles
and works for the current release, it's really a matter of recompiling
for the new kernel and doing QA. 

We also have several programs to help hardware and software vendors
certify their applications on RHEL. 

Now I do expect hardware vendors to track Fedora. They need to keep up
with changes in the kernel, in the applications, and the API as we start
the long road toward the next RHEL. And yes, we still intend to
snapshot Fedora and build RHEL from it. 

But I really don't expect hardware vendors to "support" support Fedora
the way they support RHEL. Sure, $HARDWARE drivers might be out there, but
I don't expect them to be as supported as similar drivers for RHEL. 

-- 
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--         Kevin Sonney         --
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