Newer kernel = better ? (for a server)
decibelofdeath
from Тольятти, Российская Федерация
My goals is more security and more stability.
NN comments
Tuxedoar
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Then, I would stick with the stock Debian kernel that a stable release provides. With this choice, you can be sure that you’ll have security updates in a regular basis, at least for the stable release lifetime (2 years aprox). If there’s anything that Debian’s kernel doesn’t provide, you always have the option of recompiling it, as it was mentioned before.
Otherwise, with a vainilla kernel you have to take care of security patches yourself, which implies applying them to source code and recompiling the kernel each time.
Well, without more details, yes and no.
You should run a kernel which is not the bleeding edge, but it should support all hardware necessary to run/maintain the server.
I’d first go with the stock Debian kernel, if that is not sufficient (due to configuration), you might want to rebuild that one. If that does not work, I’d use a -stable kernel from kernel.org which is still maintained.
HTH
New stuff is not always better. There are many bugs which only affect head releases, but never affect stable kernels (cause the bug was only introduced later). So it really depends on what you want to achieve. If you need more performance it might simply be cheaper to buy new hardware unless we are talking about thousands of systems. In the latter case, hire a kernel developer.