Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1

Posted Apr 29, 2015 18:39 UTC (Wed) by deater (subscriber, #11746)
In reply to: Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1 by johannbg
Parent article: Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1

> I can think of two companies on top of my head that are on the top ten
>list contributing to the kernel that are waiting for kdbus thus as I said
>I would not be surprised if the next long time supported kernel release
>would be delayed until kdbus get's merged ( or it's foreseeable that it
> never will ).

I don't think Linux kernel development works the way you think it does.
At least I hope it doesn't.

I work on Linux because in the end the people running the show have mostly good taste, and I can trust them to make good technical decisions even if I sometimes don't agree with them.

If I wanted an OS where "corporate decisions" ruled then there are plenty of fairly awful alternative OSes I could be using.

I think the official rules for what it means to have a "stable" release preclude adding major functionality like kdbus, especially if it's not upstream, so I wouldn't hold your breath on it miraculously appearing in 4.2-stable. I think in that case you'd have to fork the code and call it something other than Linux. I guess you could call it SystemDos.

Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1

Posted Apr 29, 2015 21:22 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

"I don't think Linux kernel development works the way you think it does."

Afaik the longterm kernel initiative is born out of corporate kernel maintenances, corporate needs with it's maintainers on corporate payroll while the stable kernel release is indented for community driven,fast moving target audience.

- mainline - development
- stable - fast moving and community driven distributions
- longterm - corporates

Greg can clarify if corporates needs don't steer which kernel gets chosen for longterm release and correct me if I'm wrong but then again I thought there was only two longterm release in circulation at any given time and one stable but listed here [1] are 2 stable and 7 longterm and lwn mentions Greg releasing four stable updates here [2] as opposed to two stable and two longterm so there seems to be atleast four "stable" releases in circulation which may or may not include the longterm ones in that number and perhaps total of nine so I'm probably dead wrong how they are maintaining this these days and way off how many maintained kernels are in circulation...

1. https://www.kernel.org/
2. https://lwn.net/Articles/642388/

Kernel prepatch 4.1-rc1

Posted Apr 29, 2015 23:03 UTC (Wed) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432) [Link]

Greg already released an LTSI kernel with kernel assisted DBus acceleration over two years ago: https://lwn.net/Articles/533534/ , so it would seem quite reasonable to wait for kdbus to be merged or abandoned before making another LTSI kernel release.