Re: Bumping required kernels to 3.0 for Linux backports ?

From: Arend van Spriel
Date: Thu Apr 10 2014 - 13:04:57 EST


On 04/10/14 18:59, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:44 AM, Takashi Iwai<tiwai@xxxxxxx> wrote:
At Wed, 9 Apr 2014 14:06:13 -0700,
Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:

On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 01:52:29PM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 01:01:23PM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 11:28:55AM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 2:18 AM, Felix Fietkau<nbd@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The oldest kernel in OpenWrt that we're still supporting with updates of
the backports tree is 3.3, so raising the minimum requirement to 3.0 is
completely fine with me.

OK note that 3.3 is not listed on kernel.org as supported. I'm fine in
carrying the stuff for those for now but ultimately it'd also be nice
if we didn't even have to test the kernels in between which are not
listed. This does however raise the question of how often a kernel in
between a list of supported kernels gets picked up to be supported
eventually. Greg, Jiri, do you happen to know what the likelyhood of
that can be?

I don't know of anything ever getting picked up after I have said it
would not be supported anymore.

Great! How soon after a release do you mention whether or not it will
be supported? Like say, 3.14, which was just released.

I only mention it around the time that it would normally go end-of-life.

For example, if 3.13 were to be a release that was going to be "long
term", I would only say something around the normal time I would be no
longer supporting it. Like in 2-3 weeks from now.

So for 3.14, I'll not say anything about that until 3.16-rc1 is out,
give or take a week or two.

Also, as of late are you aware any distribution picking an unsupported
kernel for their next choice of kernel?

Sure, lots do, as they don't line up with my release cycles (I only pick
1 long term kernel to maintain each year). Look at the Ubuntu releases
for examples of that. Also openSUSE and Fedora (although Fedora does
rev their kernel pretty regularly) don't usually line up. The
"enterprise" distros are different, but even then, they don't always
line up either (which is why Jiri is maintaining 3.12...)

Hope this helps,

It does! Unless I don't hear any complaints then given that some
distributions might choose a kernel in between and given also your
great documented story behind the gains on trying to steer folks
together on the 'ol 2.6.32 [0] and this now being faded, I'll be
bumping backports to only support>= 3.0 soon, but we'll include all
the series from 3.0 up to the latest. That should shrink compile /
test time / support time on backports to 1/2.

Why 3.0? That's not supported by anyone anymore for "new hardware", I'd
move to 3.2 if you could, as that's the Debian stable release that will
be maintained for quite some time yet:
https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

Well, the support for "new hardware" is what backports project itself
does, isn't it?

Besides, SLES11 is still supported, so yes, including 3.0.x would be
helpful.

That's two stakeholders for 3.0 -- but nothing is voiced for anything
older than that. Today I will rip the older kernels into oblivion.
Thanks for all the feedback!

Ok, I guess my voice was cracking when I mentioned 2.6.38 as being used over here. I am probably alone in that desert.

Regards,
Arend

Luis
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