> only Red Hat has a credible kernel ABI scheme with the required scale (because of the reasons I gave in GP).
Other distros also don't change kernel version during stable phase so I don't even know what you mean by that. Hell, RHEL kernels have more changes than say a Debian kernel over lifetime of a version.
What Red Hat uniquely does is to backport features into older version of the kernel, so statements like "you need kernel x.y.z for this to work" don't really apply, you need to find whether they backported that feature or not.
We've also experienced some "fun" with how they manage it and versions in general for example:
* Driver bug was backported from newer kernel (they backported "performance improvements" not bugs) in rhel5, so we lost VLANs on our upgrade canary
* Same bug was backported to rhel6 with same disastrous result 6 months later
* One of servers stopped booting because they changed version of LVM in STABLE DISTRO (think it was rhel6), and new LVM version deprecated/renamed some flag that we used, that made it fail on boot.
So yeah, we're very happy we migrated off it. And in Debian distro upgrade works too!
The thing is that, with RHEL and a good-enough contract, from a management perspective you can yell at them until it gets fixed. Everywhere else, you're on your own.
Sorry but paywalled content is really not a valid argument.
I agree with you that there is value in kABI stability, but this comment does nothing to convince others. Do you have a better freely accessible resource?
Other distros also don't change kernel version during stable phase so I don't even know what you mean by that. Hell, RHEL kernels have more changes than say a Debian kernel over lifetime of a version.
What Red Hat uniquely does is to backport features into older version of the kernel, so statements like "you need kernel x.y.z for this to work" don't really apply, you need to find whether they backported that feature or not.
We've also experienced some "fun" with how they manage it and versions in general for example:
* Driver bug was backported from newer kernel (they backported "performance improvements" not bugs) in rhel5, so we lost VLANs on our upgrade canary * Same bug was backported to rhel6 with same disastrous result 6 months later * One of servers stopped booting because they changed version of LVM in STABLE DISTRO (think it was rhel6), and new LVM version deprecated/renamed some flag that we used, that made it fail on boot.
So yeah, we're very happy we migrated off it. And in Debian distro upgrade works too!