how to distinguish kernel versions

fobius · 06-02-2004, 07:46 PM

hi,

i've been looking around but can't find any info on the topic. what's the difference between the different kernel versions such as mm, ac, and rc? what do they mean and what's the difference?

thanks

DrOzz · 06-02-2004, 08:06 PM

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The -mm patches are a set of patches, released by Andrew Morton, against the official kernel series. They are frequently more experimental in nature than the official series.

Quote:

Prepatches (pre) are the equivalent to alpha releases for Linux; they live in the testing directories in the archives. They should be applied using the patch(1) utility to the source code of the previous full release. The testing/incr directories contain automatically generated patches from one prepatch to another.

Prepatches may be poorly tested, and may in fact not work at all.

Quote:

Prepatches with -rc in the name are considered release candidates and may become full versions.

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Snapshots (bkx) are images from the developers repository trees. They are created automatically without any human consideration, and thus they may not work, and may not even compile at any particular time. They live in the snapshots directories in the archives, and should be applied using the patch(1) utility to the source code of the release they are derived from. For example, to get the full source code to snapshot 2.6.1-rc1-bk5, get and extract the linux-2.6.0.tar.bz2 archive, then use the patch utility to apply patch-2.6.1-rc1.bz2 followed by patch-2.6.1-rc1-bk5.bz2.

all taken from kernel.org

cokehabit · 06-24-2004, 07:28 AM

also, in addition to the above comment, the editions with *.*.*ac* are Alan Cox's own versions of the previous stable branch (2.4.x)