Embedded Linux Flag Version [LWN.net]

Embedded Linux Flag Version

Posted Nov 5, 2010 1:08 UTC (Fri) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901)
In reply to: Embedded Linux Flag Version by jengelh
Parent article: Embedded Linux Flag Version

Some companies and projects are doing a good job of staying close to mainline, and the issue for them will be that 2.6.35 will indeed start to fall behind where they want to be, soon. For example, Google has been pushing hard to catch up to mainline, and although they will have a release based on 2.6.35, they probably won't stay there long. The same goes for other forward-moving projects that are staying close to mainline (MeeGo and Linaro).

However, for a large segment of the embedded industry, just getting different companies moved up to 2.6.35 (within 1 version of mainline), and synchronized on a single release, will be a really big improvement. At the summit, CE vendors had kernel versions spread all over the place between 2.6.11 and 2.6.32.

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Embedded Linux Flag Version

Posted Nov 5, 2010 2:23 UTC (Fri) by xxiao (subscriber, #9631) [Link]

This indeed is a great idea.

Embedded Linux Flag Version

Posted Nov 5, 2010 6:28 UTC (Fri) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]

We are indeed trying to chase mainline as fast as is feasible -- we typically freeze a month or two before a release, working against the most recent released mainline version at that point. We've been doing this since 2.6.16 or so, and are getting pretty good at it now.

I certainly understand that many people may have even longer stabilization cycles than we do, may depend on several sets of vendors to stabilize, etc. In that case agreeing on a "flag version" definitely makes a lot of sense.