[ Thanks to Linux User &
Developer magazine for this link. ]
“Such a big jump in kernel version between service packs is not
common for enterprise Linux distributions, which are usually quite
conservative. For instance, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is still
using kernel version 2.6.18, even for its 8th update (RHEL 5.8),
released a week after SLES 11 SP2, and in the same way RHEL 6.2 is
still using kernel version 2.6.32. Of course these kernel versions
contain a lot of backported features from newer kernel versions,
but it?s a lot of work to patch these features in and to keep
maintaining them.“Instead of backporting and maintaining all those interesting
features, SUSE?s engineers have decided to use Linux 3.0 for SLES
11 SP2. This wasn?t done rashly: they did an extensive code review
of Linux 3.0 and verified that the kernel?s Application Binary
Interface (ABI) is completely compatible with SLE 11′s
original 2.6.27 kernel. This guarantees that all software that ran
on this kernel can expect exactly the same behaviour from the newer
kernel release. So any software that has been certified for SLE 11
is still certified for SLE 11 SP2.”