The Ksplice team is happy to announce the public availability of one of our git repositories, RedPatch. RedPatch contains the source for all of the changes Red Hat makes

to their kernel, one commit per fix and we've published it on oss.oracle.com/git. With RedPatch, you can

access the broken-out patches using git, browse them

online via gitweb, and freely redistribute the source under the terms

of the GPL. This is the same policy we provide for Oracle Linux and

the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK). Users can freely access the

source, view the commit logs and easily identify the changes that are

relevant to their environments.

To understand why we've created this project we'll need a little

history. In early 2011, Red

Hat changed how they released their kernel source, going from a

tarball that had individual patch files to shipping the kernel source

as one giant tarball with a single patch for all Red Hat-introduced

changes. For most people who work in the kernel this is merely an

inconvenience; driver developers and other out-of-kernel module

developers can see the end result to make sure their module still

performs as expected.

For Ksplice, we build individual updates for each change and rely

on source patches that are broken-out, not a giant tarball. Otherwise,

we wouldn’t be able to take the right patches to create individual

updates for each fix, and to skip over the noise — like a change that

speeds up bootup — which is unnecessary for an already-running system.

We’ve been taking the monolithic Red Hat patch tarball and breaking it

into smaller commits internally ever since they introduced this

change.

At Oracle, we feel everyone in the Linux community can benefit from

the work we already do to get our jobs done, so now we’re sharing

these broken-out patches publicly. In addition to RedPatch, the

complete source code for Oracle Linux and the Oracle Unbreakable

Enterprise Kernel (UEK) is available from both ULN and our public yum server, including all

security errata.

Check out RedPatch and subscribe to redpatch-users@oss.oracle.com for discussion about the project.

Also, drop us a line and let us know how you're using RedPatch!