LTS kernel projects and Shuttleworth's cadence proposition [LWN.net]

LTS kernel projects and Shuttleworth's cadence proposition

Posted Mar 16, 2010 21:37 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: LTS kernel projects and Shuttleworth's cadence proposition by nevyn
Parent article: Shuttleworth: 2 year cadence for major releases: some progress

The only reference I have that is publicly archived is GKH's announcement about the 2.6.32 maintainership.

ref: http://lwn.net/Articles/370236/

"I'd like to announce that the 2.6.32-stable tree is also going to be
maintained as a "long-term" stable release, living for 2-3 years, like
the 2.6.27 kernel is. This is because a number (i.e. more than 2) Linux
distributions are basing their "enterprise" releases on this kernel
version, and it will make their lives easier if I keep it alive.

Note, the viability of me keeping this tree alive for such a length of
time relies on the developers working for those distros to keep me
informed of patches that need to be backported and applied to it.
Without their help, I will have no problem in stopping the maintenance
of the tree."

---

Sounds to me like there was some private discussion between GDK and employees from at least two other vendor about their intention to ship 2.26.32, before it was marked as stable. But no publicly archived discussion to the effect as far as I know.

I would humbly suggest that it would be worthwhile to check in on how vendors are doing in holding up their end by looking at the breakdown of patch submissions into this tree on a quarterly accumulative basis over the next couple of years. I believe someone 'round these parts has the scripts to do that sort of thing for kernel tree. The first round of patch review is underway for 2.26.32.10 if I'm reading the lkml archive correctly I believe and all the expected vendors are represented.

-jef

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LTS kernel projects and Shuttleworth's cadence proposition

Posted Mar 18, 2010 5:18 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

This was initially discussed (so far as I know) between Debian and Ubuntu kernel maintainers and release managers at the Linux Plumbers Conference. I also called a BoF for distributors, which Greg K-H attended, where we discussed stable series maintenance.

At that time it was clear that 2.6.32 would be out at about the right time for Ubuntu's next release and Debian's planned freeze date. It was also rumoured that RHEL 6 would use 2.6.32, which has turned out to be correct. So the Debian and Ubuntu developers agreed that would be the one to go for.

Recently I've seen that SLES 11 SP1 will update the kernel from 2.6.27 to .32. This surprised me, but presumably the SUSE/Novell kernel maintainers (headed by Greg K-H, I believe) decided that the benefit of sharing a common version with the other 3 distributions outweighed the cost.