Kernel release status

[Posted September 16, 2020 by corbet]

The current development kernel is 5.9-rc5, released on September 13. Linus said: "So aside from the smoke from the fires, and a performance regression I'm still looking at, things look normal."

One not-entirely-normal change that hit the mainline after the 5.9-rc5 release was the abrupt removal of the "soft scrollback" code from the fbcon and vgacon console drivers. This feature, which allows the user to page backward through output written directly to the console, was once an indispensable part of the Linux experience, but it has fallen into disuse and lacks a maintainer now. The disclosure of a security vulnerability in the fbcon code was the last straw; a vgacon vulnerability has also since been reported.

This change is not universally popular; Pavel Machek described it as "a way for Linus to find a maintainer for the code". Should such a maintainer materialize (and Machek has said he would do it), the scrollback feature might yet be restored.

Stable updates: 5.8.9, 5.4.65, 4.19.145, 4.14.198, 4.9.236, and 4.4.236 were all released on September 12.

The large 5.8.10, 5.4.66, and 4.19.146 updates are in the review process; they are due on September 17.

Kernel release status

Posted Sep 17, 2020 19:06 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (4 responses)

Removing softscrollback would break consolation.
<https://salsa.debian.org/consolation-team/consolation>
There are still people using mainly the linux console for work.

Kernel release status

Posted Sep 17, 2020 20:04 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, what ever happened to the "don't break userspace" rule?

Even if you accept Linus' assertion that consoles haven't been the primary interaction method for a couple of decades (completely ignoring embedded users) soft scrollback remains an important part of system recovery environments, where you won't have X, remote network access, or indeed, anything more than an emergency shell that part of your initramfs.

I've used console softscroll three times in the past week alone.

Kernel release status

Posted Sep 17, 2020 22:05 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

I can understand Linus request of a new maintainer.
However if reporting security issues in the console code leads to features being removed, I will stop report the
ones I find...

Kernel release status

Posted Sep 18, 2020 8:25 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Doesn't gpm work? Maybe either with screen/tmux compatibility? This doesn't seem like the end of the world.

Maybe it'll spur renewed interest in kmscon...

Kernel release status

Posted Sep 18, 2020 13:09 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

gpm does not provide scrollback so this is moot.