CentOS5 and a recent kernel.

CentOS 6 is just around the corner. But for those of us who have CentOS 5 deployed just about everywhere, the wait for a better kernel is annoying. While wasting time in some unsavoury corner of the Internet, I came across vserver, which is a clever way of sharing a kernel between separate OS instances. Think of it as VM writ small.

But even if you don't want or need multiple OSes, vserver installs a RHEL 6 kernel. And it works with CentOS 5. Say you need ATA TRIM? You got it. Having trouble getting WiFi working? Bingo. Card reader on your Laptop not working? It does now.

EDIT: the catch is that sound is no longer working. While this is OK for the laptop, it isn't for my desktop. Ah well.

However, I can TRIM corey's SSD by booting with the vserver kernel, then doing

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/very-large

rm /tmp/very-large

The first command is going to fill any remaining space on the disk with zeros, so don't be doing anything important at the same time. When the disk fills up, it will exit and the second command will free the space.

You could also do the same thing with any boot CD that has TRIM support.