Re: [gentoo-user] dual-linuxdistro-boot kernel question

[Holly Bostick]

Fernando Meira schreef:
> Hi,
> I was told the following, which I don't agree, but in any case, I would
> like to hear from someone that knows :)
> - when having 2 different distro on 1 pc, do they have to use the same
> kernel?
> Even if they share the same swap partition and /boot is inside the root
> of one of the distros (and not in a separate partition)...
>
> Cheers,
> Fernando

No, they do not-- in fact, I personally think it's weird for them to use
the same kernel (I never heard of doing this before recently).

Just to authenticate myself, I currently run Gentoo and SuSE on the same
PC, and previously ran Gentoo, RedHat9, Morphix, CollegeLinux, and
Mandrake (with Win 98 and Win2K) on the same PC.

Especially when one of the distros in question is a binary distro
(Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat/Fedora, and to some extent, Debian-based
distros, and Gentoo), you wouldn't want them to use the same kernel
anyway, as binary distros are well-known to patch their kernels for the
distribution (as does Gentoo, but the Gentoo patches are not as
'essential' to the kernel's proper running as, say, SuSE's are if you're
running SuSE). Naturally, I wouldn't expect the binary distro's kernel
patches to be compatible with Gentoo, or vice-versa.

Now, of course, you could use a vanilla kernel under both (or all)
relevant distros, but that would probably be a problem for the binary
distro (after all, if the kernel patches weren't necessary, they
wouldn't put all the work in to patch the kernel, would they?).

What I do is *copy* the binary distro's kernel to the /boot partition
(which is a separate mounted partition under Gentoo, but is a folder
under / in SuSE), so that way, both distros can use the kernel they
expect to see, and it all works fine.

Why you'd really want to have two or more distros using the same kernel
at all, I really can't get, but maybe I'm dim :-) .

Holly

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