Hi,

I have just installed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES with the kernel version 2.6.9.42-EL and i need to upgrade to the Kernel version 2.6.9.5-EL to be compatible with a driver for a telecom card.

Do i have to upgrade the whole Linux version to AS ? can i make a quick work around to upgrade the Kernel ? How ?

Br,
Amr

Hello oreaba. Of course and you can update your kernel without updating the whole OS.

This tutorial I think could help you do it step by step!
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...for_RedHat_9_8

Amr, you're actually downgrading your kernel (from release 42 to release 5), not upgrading it. While this will work in 99.9% of cases, it is generally considered a bad idea to downgrade software (especially a kernel) unless you really have to. This is because there is more chance that some drivers will break or (worse) some subtle security holes will be opened up that may leave you vunerable to attack later on.

It's slightly more work but you may be better off trying to keep your existing kernel and getting the driver to work with that. In most cases, something like this will load a module compiled for a different kernel release:Have you tried contacting the maintainers of the driver and explaining your problem to them? For closed-source drivers this is often fruitless, but at least they will know that the demand is there.

Alternatively, there may be an open-source driver for your card, which you could compile from source yourself in order to exactly match whichever kernel version you are using. This is slightly more hastle, but is most likely to work.

Hope that helps,

—Robert J Lee

Hi ,

Thanks to you all, but i am a little bit confused about one thing. how the kernel 2.6.9-42.EL is Higher than 2.6.9-5.EL !!! and this is downgrading!! knowing thta -5 is for the AS version and -42 is for ES and i know that AS is higher than ES.are you sure about it is downgrading, frankly i didn't get!

about the driver i am not pretty sure about that they can give me the source code.

Thanks,
Amr

The unmodified Linux kernel is developed by an open-source team and has various new releases.

Red Hat take the latest release that is available from when they start working on a new operating system version. Once they have chosen a version, they tend to stick with that version for that OS, but then modify it with various patches to add in any functionality (such as new hardware support) that appears in later kernel releases (or even unreleased patches).

Occasionally during development and testing they feel it's worth downgrading the kernel version to a prior release if something in the later release breaks on some system. In the case of RHEL-4, AS supports more hardware combinations than ES (including the IBM power architecture and virtualisation support), so it's likely that the ES kernel has some optimisations that are not there in the AS kernel because they could break something that ES doesn't support anyway.

However, as Cyhaxor says, there is little problem in switching between any two 2.6.9 kernels; the differences are fairly minor. But I would test the system very carefully and try to be aware of the issues around what you are doing (eg. Red Hat may well refuse to support machines running the wrong kernel).

Hope that makes things clearer,

—Robert J Lee

ok i am downloading now the Red hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS version. do i have to install the whole Operating system another time. or there is an option to upgrade the OS from ES to AS ?

what do you recommend ?

There are no upgrade paths from ES to AS.