I have been living uncomfortably without hardware monitoring (CPU temp,
fans, etc.) on some of my servers for a while. For example, I see support
for the sensors chip in a tyan gs14 is built-in with kernel 2.6.14. Another
older server we use for non-critical applications has its sensor chips added
as of 2.6.13.
BQ on Centos 4 has a kernel of 2.6.9. Centos support for new hardware has
stopped on Centos 4 as of last February.
(http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=42)
While I could certainly add support to 2.6.9 for the gs14 sensors chip, but
I would be stuck building a new kernel every time I wanted to apply a centos
kernel update. A pain indeed.
Would it make more sense to upgrade to the Centos 5 Kernel (just the kernel
and the appropriately related utilities and rpms)? It is 2.6.18 - still a
2.6 kernel so it should be compatible no big deal - right???
Is this likely to break a bunch of things? Can yum reasonably be used to
keep the centos5 kernel up to date without further "polluting" the centos4
environment that BQ depends upon?
If so, using a standard kernel that is regularly maintained by the centos
folks would seem to make good sense to me.
Again, what I want to accomplish is to get the hardware support provided by
newer version of the kernel. There may be other benefits of a newer kernel.
I'm mostly concerned about the logistics and potential shortcomings.
Thanks in advance for help from those who know more about Linux than I.
-Stephanie
Stephanie Sullivan, President
AVIA web development and hosting
a division of AVIA Consulting, Inc.
GSEC Certified IT Security Consultant