[Beowulf] Repenting for sins against Dell (on good Friday, no less)

[Mark Hahn]

>> new kernel until you try - it might have dependencies on a symbol that
>> gets removed from the kernel update, for instance.
>
> Right, although distributions like RHEL do a good job of keeping the
> kernel unchanged from an API perspective within a given release.

well, I wasn't thinking about the semi-fromal kernel interface,
but rather all the internal structures.  rebuilding a kernel module
is, after all, mainly that - responding to changes in the internal
kernel headers.  kmod versioning is basically a hash of those 
headers.  but I'm not disagreeing with you - I've never actually
looked to see whether a distro manages to leave the headers unchanged
within a release.  it does seem like the interface, definied by _all_
the code in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/source/include, is pretty wide...

I guess I'm mainly thinking of quadrics kernel modules, which touch
the kernel somewhat intimately.  going between minor kernel.org 
kernel releases required some hacking around, but I don't know whether 
RHEL-stream kernels avoided that.