Distro for Linux Kernel Development

Which Linux kernels and Linux distros are supported by G-WAN?

At least G-WAN v3.3 should be compatible with the Linux distributions used when the development started in 2009 (Ubuntu 8+).

G-WAN v3.10+ added significant enhancements detailled below.

There are many different Linux distributions, but most of them use a common 'root' distribution, and the most commonly used are Debian (Ubuntu uses Debian) and Red Hat (CentOS uses Red Hat), both of which have been tested during development.

But the other distributions rely on the same Linux kernel, making any difference only possible in 'extensions' like file systems, etc. And, thanks to its users feedback, G-WAN v3.10+ has fixed non-standard file system issues (by handling those FSs that ignore system flags).

For this same reason, old GBLIC versions could also a problem for G-WAN v3.3, but G-WAN v3.10+ re-implemented those function calls that could pose problem so 10-year old Linux distribution should work fine now.

This is why list of Linux distributions that support G-WAN is very large - probably too large to be worth publishing.

Now, the kernel question is more interesting, not because it is a blocking issue (in G-WAN v3.10+, wrappers have been written for potentially missing syscalls since the Linux kernel 2.5.8) but because of the lack of performance on very old Linux kernels.

In those old kernels, G-WAN can't benefit as well as multicore systems because the OS kernel itself does not support multicore. But since G-WAN is fast server even when used with one single thread, G-WAN will not be the bottleneck.

Compatibility is an incremental process since new versions of the system parts (OS kernel, GLIBC, other system tools and libraries, etc.) are not always backward-compliant (remember the recent Linux linker issue).

In this regard, user feedback rules - and G-WAN has made tremendous efforts in this matter recently.

What are good Linux distributions (and methods) for developing the latest Linux upstream (kernel, Gnome etc.) packages?

With regards to my question above, I discovered Gnome has a build system called "jhbuild" ( live.gnome.org/Jhbuild ) where you can get up to the latest git commit versions of the entire Gnome project. So that would be the solution to the example from above. I agree that KVMs are a good environment to play around in without worrying about too much damage, I've begun doing that more after reading the answers. Thanks for the replies.

Learning Linux Kernel programming on a virtual machine on Ubuntu?

Yes you can safely test kernel modules on a virtual machine!
I'll give you some links that may help:
watch this site

• http://free-electrons.com/

in particular this book:

• http://free-electrons.com/doc/books/ldd3.pdf

Also this guide:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Module-HOWTO/

---

Related Topics