[ale] CentOS 6.6 Kernels?

[Lightner, Jeff]

RHEL7 does in fact use the 3.x kernel.

As noted by Leam the way RedHat does things inside each of their major releases is start with the base upstream package then back port security and enhancements into their version.   This is why you see extended versioning on their packages (not just the kernel).    It annoys Developers because they always want to use the latest upstream version of things and you have to explain to them the point in using RedHat is stability.

So 2.6.18-371.4.1.el5 on RHEL 5.10 is based on upstream kernel version 2.6.18 and the -371.4.1.el5 shows you the extended versioning for that specific RHEL kernel.    All RHEL 5.x will have 2.6.18 base but each subversion will come with updated extended versioning.  (You can also update the kernel extended version without doing a full “yum update” to update all the other GNU packages but RedHat recommends doing the latter to insure all the packages are designed to work together.)

Similarly 3.10.0-229.1.2.el7.x86_64 on RHEL 7.1 is based on upstream kernel version 3.10.0.  All RHEL 7.x will start with that same base.

On RHEL 6.x you’ll a slightly newer base upstream of 2.6.x which is 2.6.32 (RHEL 6.5 = 2.6.32-431.el6.x86_64)

You can find out what CVEs and are addressed and what other enhancements are in it by looking at the extended versioning at RedHat.


Jeffrey C. Lightner
Sr. UNIX/Linux Administrator

DS Services of America, Inc.
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Atlanta, GA  30339-8461

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E: jlightner at dsservices.com

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of leam hall
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2015 9:38 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] CentOS 6.6 Kernels?

I believe RHEL/CentOS 7 uses the 3.x kernel. The "RH" way is to include security fixes but not change the first two version numbers. So your kernel should be okay, security wise, but not with the latest enhancements.


On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 9:27 AM, DJ-Pfulio <DJPfulio at jdpfu.com<mailto:DJPfulio at jdpfu.com>> wrote:
I'm new to CentOS. Last time I used Redhat was around 2000-2002-ish.  Been a
Unix and Linux admin since the mid-1990s.  Installed a CentOS 6.6 minimal server
this week, did a yum upgrade and rebooted.

The kernel is like - 40 yrs old - is that normal or RHEL/CENT?

$ uname -a
Linux cent18 2.6.32-504.16.2.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Apr 22 06:48:29 UTC 2015
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


I've been having fun learning the redhat ways of doing things the last few days.
Fun, fun.

So - do I just need to reset expectations for using a 3.x kernel?


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