What are "vanilla" versions?

StevenO · 02-10-2006, 12:31 AM

Hi guys,

What exactly is "vanilla" version / "vanilla" build?
I've seen this term most of the time but I do not know what it refers to.

Please advise.

Thanks.

Steven.

titanium_geek · 02-10-2006, 12:50 AM

Vanilla is a slang term for plain/ordinary, so I guess it would be the version that is not optimised for any particular distro/hardware.

titanium_geek

perfect_circle · 02-10-2006, 12:56 AM

this is from wikipedia:

Quote:

Versions

Further developing his own code and integrating changes made by other programmers, Linus Torvalds keeps releasing new versions of the Linux kernel. These are called "vanilla" kernels, meaning they have not been modified by anyone. Many providers of GNU/Linux operating systems modify the kernels of their product, mainly in order to add support for drivers or features which have not officially been released as stable, while some distributions, such as Slackware, rely on vanilla kernels.

So in other words vanilla is the official and unpatched kernel version. the one you download from www.kernel.org