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Stable kernel 2.4.37.10
The 2.4 kernel lives - for a little while longer, at least. Willy Tarreau
has just released the 2.4.37.10 update,
with a small set of important fixes. This might just be the last update in
this series, unless some sort of important fix comes in. "If nothing
happens before September 2011, it's possible that there won't be any
2.4.37.11 at all. By that time, the 2.6 kernel will have been available for
almost 8 years, this should have been enough for anyone to have a look at
it. Users now have one year to migrate or to report critical bugs. I think
that's an honest deal." See the announcement for the full
description of his planned policy.
(Log in to post comments)
Stable kernel 2.4.37.10 Posted Sep 6, 2010 14:23 UTC (Mon) by smadu2 (subscriber, #54943) [Link]
The announcement mentions "long-term supported 2.6.27 and 2.6.32 kernels". Are both .27 and .32 long term supported kernels ?
Stable kernel 2.4.37.10 Posted Sep 6, 2010 14:53 UTC (Mon) by Nord (guest, #35114) [Link]
Yes. And this is absolutely correct since they support different set of features as wel as have different ABI
Stable kernel 2.4.37.10 Posted Sep 10, 2010 0:37 UTC (Fri) by deweerdt (subscriber, #18159) [Link]
Is there some place listing the ABI differences?
Stable kernel 2.4.37.10 Posted Sep 13, 2010 20:49 UTC (Mon) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]
Thanks for your years of effort on this, Willy. Your work is very important for people who really need to trust their machines.
Eight years is a long, long time. I admire your dedication.
It strikes me that, should you be so silly as to sign up again, you might look into shortening that cycle a little, perhaps announcing EOL at five years, and discontinuing support at six. Backward compatibility is pretty good in the kernel, and six years is typically about four generations of hardware.
Much depends on the support policies for the system libraries... even if you're providing a nicely stable kernel for eight years, if the rest of the system bits have rotted, you may actually be doing the users a disservice, giving them a reason to stay on systems that really should be upgraded.
I haven't looked into this at all. I'm just typing off the cuff here. Perhaps the major libraries do get backported bug fixes for that long. But if they don't, you could probably EOL sooner without really hurting anything.
Thanks again. Yeoman work, sir.
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