A short digression on FOSS (Re: understanding speculative preallocation)

[Dave Chinner]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 09:18:52AM +0200, Stefan Ring wrote:
> > "You have to talk to whomever builds the kernel packages for the distro
> > you're working on; they should be able to tell you which XFS {version|
> > release|checkout} is built into that particular kernel RPM."
> 
> For what it's worth, you can try to pry this info out of Oracle's
> RedPatch <https://oss.oracle.com/projects/RedPatch/>, which actually
> doesn't look all that active anymore recently, but given that it's
> Oracle, one cannot seriously be surprised about anything.

Oh, that thing. It hasn't ben maintained because it didn't work
properly, needed lots of hand holding, and nobody actually cared.

> The thing is, that RHEL XFS and mainline XFS seem to have drifted
> apart a good deal, and as result, for an outsider, it is very
> difficult to correlate patches between the two branches.

Sure, they have diverged signficant;y as we've backported various
bits of XFs fetaures and bug fixes back into RHEL6. As have every
other distro that doesn't track mainline directly. That's why you
need to look at the kernel source package to know what code the
distro is running.

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david at fromorbit.com