Hi - I am totally new to Linux, and I need to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.24 or greater. It is now at 2.4.21-27.ELhugemem Are there instructions on where to get the new kernel and do the upgrade?

You can't just upgrade RHEL3's kernel. RHEL3 was designed for the 2.4.x kernel.

What you're really trying to do is upgrade the OS completely. The 2.6.x kernels are used starting in RHEL4. The latest RHEL is RHEL5 which uses even later 2.6.x kernels.

If you have a subscription with RedHat on RHN you likely can get the install media and install the newer OS version. However, given how different 2.4.x kernels were from 2.6.x there may be things you're using now that simply won't work with 2.6.x (or won't work without massive effort).

Why do you need the new kernel?

Hi Jlighter -

Thanks for the quick response... I am in the process of trying to attach a DROBO-Pro disk array to a Sun v60x system, running RHL rel 3 update 4, and the documentation says that I need the kernel 2.6.24 or greater. So, if you say I need RHEL 4 to do this, I may not be able to load that as the Sun v60x may not support it. On the Sun v60x, the online documentation says you can load these Linux revs:

Red Hat Linux 7.3
Red Hat Linux 8.0
Red Hat Linux 9
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1

I am kind of bewildered by the naming conventions - does RHEL3 have a second "sub-number-designation" like 7.3 or 8... Are the above actual release numbers???

RedHat used to have be the whole name of the distro. It went up through version 9.

At that point RedHat rebranded as RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and started renumbering from there. RHEL 2.1 is nearly the same as RedHat 9. RHEL3 was an enhancement of that. (All of those had 2.4.x kernels). With RHEL4 you first see the 2.6.x kernel.

The RedHat versions were both for commercial and non-commercial. After they started making RHEL they dumped the non-commercial. Later they started Fedora to take the non-commercial version's place.

If you're using RHEL3 you're already using a version "not supported" by your Sun v60x. It may be possible to install RHEL4 or RHEL5 (I wouldn't bother with RHEL4 at this point) but you'd likely have to work out some details. Doing a Google search for RHEL5 and v60x may reveal others who've already tried it and give you some insight.

You also need to be aware that RH handles it's kernels differently than everybody else. For any one release(RHEL3.X, 4.X, 5.X) they keep the same base kernel for the entire life cycle of the version. RHEL5.0 came out with a 2.6.18 based kernel and RHEL5.7(or however high they go) will also have a 2.6.18 based kernel. However they do back port security patches and hardware support into the kernels to make them the equivalent(roughly) of a much newer kernel. RHEL5.3 is currently running 2.6.18-128.4.1.el5, which is probably much closer to a vanilla .26 kernel than it is to a vanilla .18 kernel. Usually hardware that was supported in a earlier version will have native support in a newer version(ie if it ran on RH9 it should easily run on RHELX.X). The more popular the hardware the greater the chance that this is true.

lazlow, jlightner - thanks a lot for the info.... still working to get the drobo-pro to work. When I try to make a filesystem, it comes back with:

#mke2fs -j -i 262144 drobovol0 -m 0 -O sparse_super /dev/sdc1
mke2fs 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
mke2fs: bad blocks count - /dev/sdc1