Hi. On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 08:15:42AM +0100, mick crane wrote: > Am I right in thinking that the kernel is a single codebase agreed between > all the kernel developers at any particular date
No. As [1] shows us, there's a mainline branch (aka to-be-released kernel), stable branch (aka released kernel) and longterm support branches. Also, anyone can make their own fork of the kernel. To name the most used ones there are RedHat's fork and OpenWRT's fork. > and that Linux > distributions can take bits out from that for their release Every Linux distribution effectively maintains their own branch of kernel, Debian included. AFAIK Slackware is one of distributions that tries to to maintain the least deviation from the upstream possible. > but shouldn't > add bespoke stuff that isn't agreed by everybody else ? Tell that to RedHat, which single-handedly implemented their own special way of signing the kernel and its modules (and which was not accepted by upstream). Or Novell with their kgraft. Or Oracle with ksplice and dtrace. Reco