Kernel release status

[Posted May 14, 2013 by corbet]

The current development kernel is 3.10-rc1, released on May 11. All told, nearly 12,000 changesets were pulled into the mainline during the merge window, making it the busiest such ever. See the separate article below for a summary of the final changes merged for the 3.10 development cycle.

Stable updates: 3.9.2, 3.8.13, 3.4.45, and 3.0.78 were released on May 11; 3.2.45 came out on May 14.

In the 3.8.13 announcement Greg Kroah-Hartman said: "NOTE, this is the LAST 3.8.y kernel release, please move to the 3.9.y kernel series at this time. It is end-of-life, dead, gone, buried, and put way behind us never to be spoken of again. Seriously, move on, it's just not worth it anymore." But the folks at Canonical, having shipped 3.8 in the Ubuntu 13.04 release, are not moving on; they have announced support for this kernel until August 2014.

Kernel release status

Posted May 16, 2013 1:47 UTC (Thu) by naptastic (guest, #60139) [Link] (6 responses)

How is one supposed to figure out which kernel versions are going to be supported for a long time, and which ones will be abandoned with haste and prejudice as this one was?

Kernel release status

Posted May 16, 2013 3:34 UTC (Thu) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link] (5 responses)

I didn't abandon this one any "quicker" than any other stable release, so I don't understand the "haste and prejudice" comment.

As for finding out the support status of kernels, please see: https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html
for a list of the currently supported long-term kernels, and who is doing that work.

Kernel release status

Posted May 16, 2013 6:50 UTC (Thu) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032) [Link] (4 responses)

Unfortunately, the Canonical guys don't seem to be using kernel.org infrastructure for their extended support. So I guess the effort will be lost for everybody but Ubuntu users. Where is a non Ubuntu user supposed to hear about kernel updates and be able to download them, if not on kernel.org?

Kernel release status

Posted May 16, 2013 11:33 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

LKML and LWN. Where else? :-)

Kernel release status

Posted May 16, 2013 19:24 UTC (Thu) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]

> Where is a non Ubuntu user supposed to hear about kernel updates and be able to download them

Not sure why one would want to use an Ubuntu kernel with some other distribution.

Well, for those who really like to do it, it should not be a problem to write a small cron job that takes an http connection to the Ubuntu repo and checks whether a new kernel has become available. Canonical also used to have a changelog server, which their package manager uses to display the changelog even before downloading the package (haven't looked at Ubuntu internals for a while, but I'd assume it hasn't gone anywhere). Accessed via http, too.

Alternatively, their source seems to be --- surprise surprise for a kernel developer --- in a git repo. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/SourceCode

Kernel release status

Posted May 16, 2013 20:32 UTC (Thu) by henrix (subscriber, #59512) [Link] (1 responses)

> Where is a non Ubuntu user supposed to hear about kernel updates and be able to download them, if not on kernel.org?

In the same places as any other stable kernel: stable@vger.kernel.org and linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org. (Also at kernel-team@lists.ubuntu.com, but this list is generally more Ubuntu-specific).

Note that these kernels (both 3.5 and 3.8) are not Ubuntu kernels. While maintaining these kernels, we follow the rules defined in Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt. The only difference is that we don't keep our git trees in kernel.org, but they are public (see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable for details).

Kernel release status

Posted May 19, 2013 12:37 UTC (Sun) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]

> Note that these kernels (both 3.5 and 3.8) are not Ubuntu kernels.

Thanks for the clarification.