Hi,
What is Vanilla kernel ? Is the kernel sources in the following link "http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/" are vanilla kernels ? What is the difference between the default kernel by installing from Red Hat CDROM and Vanilla kernel in the above link ?

With Regards,
S.Suriya Mohan.

The kernels at www.kernel.ORG are vanilla kernels.

Each different distribution takes these vanilla kernels and adds their own type of flavoring. They may fix particular bugs in the code (Debian is very good at doing this), and they may add their own patches to do fancy things (SuSE adds a patch to do a boot screen animation), and they may add patches to enhance the facilities of the kernel (often using the source from the developmental branch of the kernel eg for very new USB devices).

Thus, although all kernels are derived from the same kernel source, not all kernels are equal.

So if you have a particular distribution and take advantage of some of the non standard features of the kernel, and then go and download a vanilla kernel, your hot new trendy USB device may no longer work and if you are on SusE you will no longer see a flashy boot time animation.

Hi,

Can we remove some system calls of our choice after downloading the vanilla source.

Also, how can I know in which places of the kernel, a particular system call is being used.

Please help me in this regard.

Thanks..

That's the whole point of open src, you can do anything you want...
If you know what you are looking for, use the tool you favour eg grep or egrep.

I think Slackware uses the nearest thing to a vanilla kernel. Ubuntu uses chocolate. Debian uses raspberry ripple.

Whoopeeeeeee!!! I'm a Senior Member now (still know **** all though)

This is true. To my knowledge, Patrick Volkerding does not alter the kernel at all, only creates his own kernel packages directly from the source.

The ChangeLog for the latest 12.1 release shows there was a patch applied to the kernel-generic-2.6.24.5 source. Is this an upstream patch though?

It was a security patch for a flaw found in the kernel a few months back, can't remember the details. It was before 12.1 came out.

From what I can tell, it was a patch released by kernel.org since it not only affected Slackware.

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename...=CVE-2008-1375