Long-term support and backport risk

Long-term support and backport risk

the big problem with all these stability proposals is the idea that you can know ahead of time if the kernel release is going to be good enough or a dog.

even under the old even/odd release you had some odd kernels that were extremely stable and some even kernels that you wouldn't want to run

if the distros don't want to run the latest kernel.org kernels then let them pick a kernel 1-2 revisions back (after the -stable series has cleaned up what was found) and use that, accepting that it doesn't have all the latest fixes, but has been tested more.

I've been useing kernel.org kernels in production environments since 1996 and I see no sign of the declining quality that people keep claiming.

what I do is when I look to do a kernel upgrade I take the latest kernel and start testing it. I also watch for reports of problems with that kernel and the type of things that are fixed in -stable. after a few weeks (with me spending no more then a couple hours a week on this) it's pretty clear if this is a good candidate or not. if not I wait for the next release and try again, if so I build kernels for all my different hardware and setup some stress tests. I spend a day or two hammering on test boxes and then roll out the result to production. a year or so later I repeat the process. (unless there is a security hole found that forces an upgrade sooner)

if I were to go with distro kernels instead I would have to do about the same testing with the kernel the distro provides becouse I'm still the one responsible for any system failures and I know from painful experiance that even if the failure is completely the vendors fault I'm the one who gets blamed (after all I selected that vendor, or I should have tested more to find the problem)