Does centos ever upgrade the kernel for a major release?

[Maximilian]

Im not asking to upgrade it manually, but do they every push a kernel upgrade down the automatic update thingamajig? Like going from 3.10 to 3.17 or something?

The reason I ask is this:

This happens a lot lol. Nothing actually happens though, the system dosent freeze or anything so theres no obvious negative effects from this crash. I think updated drivers would solve it, its a pentium G3220 CPU and I dont think the haswell iGPU drivers are all that great in the 3.10 kernel. I dont want to upgrade the kernel manually though in case it breaks other stuff. Would be nice to know if the kernel gets updated through official channels though!

 

[lxskllr]

Probably not until the next release. You'll only get security fixes. I really know nothing about it, but that's typically how stable releases work, and CentOS(RedHat) makes Debian stable look bleeding edge in comparison.

 

[Maximilian]

Hmm okay, think it would be a good idea to upgrade the kernel manually then? I might give it a shot when ive got some spare time, see what happens.

 

[escrow4]

This reminds me why I only run Linux on my server. Upgrade a package to fix something and break 5,348 other packages. Oops.

 

[lxskllr]

Hmm okay, think it would be a good idea to upgrade the kernel manually then? I might give it a shot when ive got some spare time, see what happens.

I'd give it a try after backing up. Honestly, I don't think RedHat is very suitable on the desktop. It's good when you have a set of applications you expect to work for years to come(enterprise use), but it gets pretty stale before the next release for your average desktop user, especially if you get new hardware faster than an enterprise schedule. Fedora has the opposite problem, where things move quick, and you're always reinstalling cause support gets dropped fast.

You like what you like, and there's a lot to be said about stability, but it might not be a bad time to examine your use, and see if RedHat is really the best fit.

 

[Maximilian]

Cheers for the advice :thumbsup:

Ive never actually backed up anything before beyond just copy/pasting to another location lol. Gotta look into that at some point!

Oh and it is a server, its my home server. Yeah I know servers shouldn't have a GUI seems to be the prevailing consensus. That crash is probably a good example of why servers dont have GUIs heh. But as you said, I like what I like and that's a GUI

 

[lxskllr]

If you have the room to spare for a full image, and can afford a bit of down time, Clonezilla will make a nice image of the whole thing so you can get back to what you have now. If you don't have much time invested in customization, you can just backup the data with the understanding you may need to reinstall if things go very bad. I wouldn't expect a kernel upgrade would seriously break anything though. That should be fixable by simply rebooting, and selecting the kernel you're using now.

Edit:
Checkout this page for different repos you can use. A couple looked interesting for modernizing a system without changing everything...

http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

 

[A5]

I will add that trying to go from a distribution-specific kernel to something closer to mainline is not going to be a trivial job. The most I'd probably do is get more detailed log information about your crash and see if there is a patch for it in the upstream kernel...if there is, you might be able to add it into the CentOS/RHEL kernel sources (or even better, find the bug tracker entry for the issue and submit it to them) without too much trouble if the patch is simple.

If it isn't a simple patch, I'd consider a different distro. Home servers don't need the kind of package stability that CentOS/RHEL provide, and it will probably get frustrating over time if a package you use adds a feature you want, but you won't see an "official" update for 4 years.

(Also, honestly, 1 OOPS per month isn't too bad for a home system, especially if it doesn't bring the system down.)

 

[Maximilian]

Updated to 3.19 and no crashes yet, its been a day since the update:

I used that ELRepo in your link lxskllr, its got the latest kernel in it.

@A5 I was using linux mint but there was a weird file transfer error with most of the debian based distros I tried, even the ones based off debian directly and not ubuntu, I dunno what it was but it could be my samsung hard drives (I did try a number of things to resolve this but gave up in the end). The error wasent there in OpenSUSE but that didn't play well with nomachine so that left me with CentOS. No error and plays well with nomachine :thumbsup:

I tried fedora but the gnome3 default thing puts me off bigtime, plus id rather have a stable server, it just needs to sit there and do its thing, I wont be messing with it too much so no need for cutting edge stuff.