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Comment by RandomThoughts3 | Hacker News Reader

Note that the world would be significantly better if entreprise distros stopped doing that and just shipped the latest kernel. I understand freezing user space because most developers don’t care about shipping stable software and break compatibility all the time but the kernel takes its pledge to never break user space very seriously.

The backporting is very much hit and miss.

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Regressions in upstream kernel exist; they may be security issues, assertion failures, performance regressions, and so on. It's just too much work to validate a whole new kernel every six months, and also much harder to pinpoint a regression. People have tried shipping the latest kernel; it's the same in all environments, from enterprise distros to network appliances to phones, people end up sticking to an upstream release and do backports on top.

I have been using upstream kernels on multiple machines including network equipments for more than a decade now. I will take the risk of regressions over back ported patches any day.

Apart for regulations mandating vulnerable (we can call them outdated if you prefer being coy) versions, the elephant in the room is obviously non mainlined drivers but I wouldn’t touch that with a ten feet pole anyway.

The one difference is that in at least some cases RHEL freezes things to provide a stable kernel ABI - https://access.redhat.com/solutions/444773

Sure but the world would also be better without out of tree patches which don’t track the mainline.

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