Greg Kroah-Hartman Stretches Support Periods for Key Linux LTS Kernels
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I wish there was more pressure for this. Especially as Android Virtualization Framework starts really arriving & being useful, having a more modern kernel could be a very nice help, could offer neat new capabilities.
Certainly the big guys like IBM/RedHat are putting effort into maintaining their legacy trees.
> In my experience it's more like, ship 5+ year old kernel and then forget it forever.
I think that's the case with smaller vendors, like the teams that produce a custom kernel for the newest ARM single board kit. Once most of their inventory is sold they have little incentive to dedicate engineering bandwidth to updates. (And there's always the community effort to pick up the slack.)
After all, they're on the hook for not breaking users already working devices and don't get anything by risking lawsuits and recalls.
No? A specific patch for a vulnerability is often tiny, and upstream LTS kernel devs handles much testing.
You test for issues, but the scope is tiny. The amount of churn to a new kernel is massive.
It's not even close to the same work. And why do it? Whatever for?
New isn't a good reason.
Frankly, as long as the userland and kernel are getting security updates, who cares? Understand, this is a lot of work alone.
It just takes my breath away, is existentially scary, to hear folks be ok with being totally stuck on place. With devices that use open source but which are so fundamentally dead, are tuned out from that amazing growing goodness, are shovelware devices thrown over the wall that never improves while time marches forward.
This would be totally unacceptable for anyone on a computer. But somehow on consumer devices, it's just expected and accepted that everything is just stuck where it is, that it's ok to be so so so much worse than what everyone else is doing. It sounds like such a miserable existence, and I think it's just gobsmacking that such apathy & pass giving gets a break.
Will some things break sometimes? Honestly I think that's way overblown a concern, but yes, some, a tiny bit of things will break. Especially at first. I tend to think the risk is generally quite small. And often with engineering, the way to deal with your hard parts is to keep doing them. If anything, I expect that the risk of staying where we are is huge: we have thousands or perhaps millions of different kernel trees out there, bespoke special magical trees, for various devices, forked from magical point in time vendor BSPs, with special magical changes that we have to keep perpetuating, while integrating important fixes. This all sounds ridiculously unstable and risky, and inordinately costly to maintain. It seems reckless and dangerous to stick to this absurd course, to do everything so badly, at such human cost. Getting the fricking drivers upstreamed, maybe getting rid of this ridiculous anti-support GKI layer that apparently does no good and only makes it easier to be bad at updating & negligence & caring: that would reduce risk. That would decrease society from having to test these thousands or millions of kernels, and let us create a known predictable focus for our energies and tests, rather than this madcap batshit infinite vendor diversity that GKI has only sort of tamed.
This is such a shit situation to be in, and Android brings shame to computing, and if it's going to be so bad at Linux, it ethically doesn't deserve to have Linux. It is breaking the pact of what Linux can and should mean, and betraying consumers, by letting itself be a product that rots into obsolescence like this. This is a techno-spiritual sin, and it is a mortal sin.
It's the only way to run a desktop and maintain stability.
I don't think people realize how long it takes for the kernel to eventually catch up with your hardware.
My one year old framework laptop motherboard STILL don't have properly implemented usb-c PD apis in the kernel today. Imagine if I took a 5y old kernel?
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioner...
It's cowardice and FUD, in my view, to clutch to such old versions. It's just bad practice and bad engineering, and a crock of scary tales to make other people (& the people doing this) think their bad engineering & absurd self-injuring time-wasting practices are good, actually.
A lot of devices need to change their expectations around what qualification means, for a lot of systems & devices where requalification is such a pain that a kernel upgrade is a daunting task.
> the Linux kernel is catching up with its users’ wants when it comes to longevity.
> Kernel end-of-life dates mean very little for users, even at the enterprise level.
So... no one cares about longevity? Or they do? I'm confused.
From TFA:
> Kernel end-of-life dates mean very little for users, even at the enterprise level. Enterprise Linux distros have already been supporting official expired kernels for decades.
It's strange to think of LF "throwing it over the wall" on a timeline of years and decades, but the vendors really do assume the LTS responsibility as part of their value proposition, no?