Re: 5.10 LTS Kernel: 2 or 6 years?

From: Hanjun Guo
Date: Sat Feb 20 2021 - 02:04:05 EST


On 2021/2/19 17:08, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 04:54:24PM +0800, Hanjun Guo wrote:
Hi Greg,

On 2021/1/26 15:29, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
[...]

I want to see companies _using_ the kernel, and most importantly,
_updating_ their devices with it, to know if it is worth to keep around
for longer than 2 years. I also, hopefully, want to see how those
companies will help me out in the testing and maintenance of that kernel
version in order to make supporting it for 6 years actually possible.

So, are you planning on using 5.10? Will you will be willing to help
out in testing the -rc releases I make to let me know if there are any
problems, and to help in pointing out and backporting any specific
patches that your platforms need for that kernel release?

We(Huawei) are willing to commit resources to help out in testing the
stable -rc releases, and to help to backport patches for stable kernels.

Wonderful!

5.10 stable kernel will be used for openEuler [1] kernel and also inside
Huawei. From customer's feedback, it's very important to see the stable
kernel we used to be maintained for 6 years in the community, and we
will use 5.10 kernel for at least 6 years, so we are willing to help
you and help ourselves :)

In specific, we will start from the testing work, using HULK robot
(reports lots of bugs to mainline kernel) testing framework to test
compile, reboot, functional testing, and will extend to basic
performance regression testing in the future.

Great! Do you all need an email notification when the -rc releases come
out for the stable trees, or can you trigger off of the -rc stable git
tree? Different CI systems work in different ways :)

We can trigger the test when you updated the -rc stable git tree,
by monitoring new commits for the stable branches. So if you push
all the commits at once for -rc stable branches, then our CI system
can work well.


And if you can reply to the -rc release emails with a "Tested-by:" tag,
I will be glad to add that to the release commit when that happens to
show that you all have tested the release.

Thanks, will reply "Tested-by:" with -rc releases. We are working on
setting up the test farm and will report the test results in a week.


And we will start from ARM64 and X86 architecture first, and then extend
to other platforms.

That's a good start, the useful ones :)

For patch backporting, will send the bugfix patches (from mainline)
we spotted, but I think this work may not doing in regular but will
be triggered as needed.

That's fine, it is not something that happens at a regular interval.

Does this sound good to you?

Yes it does, thank you so much.

greg k-h

Thanks
Hanjun