A long-term kernel support update [LWN.net]

Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted an update on his plans for long-term kernel maintenance. As he announced before, the 3.1 series is almost at the end of its update period; he is also approaching the end of his maintenance for the long-lived 2.6.32 release. "It is approaching it's end-of-life, and I think I only have another month or so doing releases of this. After I am finished with it, it might be picked up by someone else, but I'm not going to promise anything." As it happens, Tim Gardner has stated that Ubuntu will support 2.6.32 through April 2015 - though whether that support will translate into kernel releases outside of the Ubuntu distribution is not clear. Ubuntu also plans to take on 3.2 as a long-term supported kernel.

to post comments

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 10, 2012 16:38 UTC (Tue) by mpagano (guest, #46586) [Link] (5 responses)

I hope Ubuntu does upstream their patchset but from their history and current actions (see ALPS Dell patchset), I have doubts.

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 10, 2012 17:02 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I imagine they'd find it most straightforward to follow the usual long-term support procedure to generate a vanilla 2.6.32.x, and they add their own patches to that. If you don't follow the standard practice, there's no benefit to officially adopting the series.

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 10, 2012 20:42 UTC (Tue) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link] (3 responses)

They should've tried harder to push Dell and ALPS to provide a sane driver. As far as I know the current patchset was rejected upstream because it's only doing magical undocumented initialization and then falling back to a dumber protocol (i.e. IMPS/2) than you'd normally talk with a touchpad. In the end, if customers actually had a choice, they'd avoid the Dell laptops for exactly that reason (and if you use the touchpad, it is dazed and confused even with the patch once in a while).

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 10, 2012 22:01 UTC (Tue) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link] (2 responses)

linux-next seems to include support for recent ALPS touchpads (commit 25bded7cd60f, "Input: ALPS - add support for protocol versions 3 and 4"). Does it not work? Any links for people who missed the fuss?

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 10, 2012 23:09 UTC (Tue) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link] (1 responses)

Then I have to take that back. Kudos to Seth! Any idea when this will land in
mainline, if it didn't already? I guess the author would need to send an
explicit merge requests to take something from -next?

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 11, 2012 1:03 UTC (Wed) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

$ git log 7cf801cfc077 ^origin/master
$

Merged today at 10:55 pacific time, apparently, if "git log --ancestry-path 7cf801cfc077..origin/master" is not tricking me.

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 10, 2012 22:08 UTC (Tue) by oseemann (subscriber, #6687) [Link] (2 responses)

I'd be happy to see the next longtime kernel include the recent writeback changes, which came in with 3.2.

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 10, 2012 22:11 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

The writeback changes are big and intrusive, though; they are just the sort of thing that is not supposed to go into stable updates.

A long-term kernel support update

Posted Jan 11, 2012 9:16 UTC (Wed) by oseemann (subscriber, #6687) [Link]

You are right. I meant that I'd be happy to see 3.2 (or later) as a longterm release, instead of 3.0, because of the writeback changes.