Hi, Is the patching of the kernel by Mandriva necessary?
(I mean for good functionning of the OS with mandriva tools or scripts or anything else)

I may find some times to compile my first kernel.
I have a 2.6.14 source from a magazine.
I was going to add it alongside Mandy 10.2's kernel.

In other words, should I look for a 2.6.14 mandriva patched source kernel (if this is available), or can I just upgrade to any 2.6.14 or above, without worrying too much about these mandriva patches.

I know I could urpmi a new kernel,
http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/security/kernelupdate
but at the end of the day I want to see if I can do it from the source I have, or another source, not from a rpm).

I have seen occasional rambling about mdk patching of the kernel breaking things. I really have no experience to say that it does.

PS: This will be my first kernel compilation;
I have plenty of links and readings to help me through,
so this should be all right.

The one thing I can think of that will break is supermount. Look in your /etc/fstab file and if you have supermount on the lines with /dev/cdrom or /dev/fd0 then your kernel is patched with supermount.

You can manually patch your kernel if you want to keep supermount or you can leave out supermount and change you /etc/fstab file so you manually mount your cdrom or floppy

http://sourceforge.net/projects/supermount-ng

<edit> Be sure you use the config file located in the /boot directory when you build your new kernel. That way you know you are starting from a "known good" config file.

cd /usr/src/linux
MYKERNEL="`uname -r`"; cp /boot/config-$MYKERNEL .config
make oldconfig

Yes, for good functioning it is necessary. Often though you can get away with a vanilla kernel with no patches since the bugs/incompatabilities the patches fix might not always affect you.

That's definately the best way - make sure you can still boot into Mandriva's kernel if you need to.

I don't think Mandriva has released a 2.6.14 kernel RPM, but there might be one if you look in the cooker repostories.

That only gets the updated kernels for your distro and since updates are backported into the current kernel version for the distro using this method you'll never get a newer version of the kernel.

Supermount is only for floppy drives in these newer versions of Mandriva. It uses hal/fstab-sync for CD/DVD and USB drives

Thanks very much for these comprehensive answers.
I do use supermount. I will try with a vanilla kernel, and patch it for supermount.

Gosh, never realised this was done that way.

I hope the 2.6.14 [edit 2.6.15 does this is the milestone] now makes smartmontools work with
sata drive (I read somewhere about these kind of improvements).
Anyway, this is the curiosity factor first

The day I manage to get this to work, and I notice some
incompatibilities, I will post back here.

Yeah pretty much every distro does this, and not just for the kernel but for almost every other package too. Its why you have to keep upgrading to the latest version of your distro if you want to keep up with the latest packages.

I guess I slept right through that change. Mandrake has been holding onto supermount for way too long. Time to let go and move onto better things.

Yeah I asked on the cooker mailing list because I was confused about how it all worked: