Six new stable kernels

[Posted November 19, 2020 by jake]

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 5.9.9, 5.4.78, 4.19.158, 4.14.207, 4.9.244, and 4.4.244 stable kernels. They all contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users of those series should upgrade.

Six new stable kernels

Posted Nov 20, 2020 0:00 UTC (Fri) by JMB (guest, #74439) [Link] (2 responses)

Is the build problem for Ubuntu Mainline Kernel:
* https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.9.9/
a kernel problem like before or is it an Ubuntu problem?
I thought the long gap between release and LWN info is caused by waiting for a corrected kernel ...

Six new stable kernels

Posted Nov 20, 2020 10:21 UTC (Fri) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

The logs are there - at least one of them (amd64 test) failed on an ABI break - I suspect it's an artifact of the build process on Ubuntu? It's a tough one when stable kernels come out every other day now ...

Six new stable kernels

Posted Nov 20, 2020 16:54 UTC (Fri) by JMB (guest, #74439) [Link]

Yes, that is along the line of my speculation - but the question is if it could be the kernel or just the build process used by Ubuntu - but seems to be the build process ... so waiting for the next kernel and hoping the process works.
If everything is OK an automated build should work flawlessly - but I have no inside knowledge.
I am just using it out of convenience ... and would really wish for Ubuntu changing to a rolling kernel model like a more timely HWE stack - just using latest stable release of Linux, Mesa, X.org - cough/Wayland compositor, utilities for kernel/mesa etc. - so a real HWE enablement (not the minimum provided right now).
And the same for standard applications. The only programs used in that way on Ubuntu are the only one which do harm:
Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. But braking basic add-ons is done on purpose - and Mozilla knows what they are doing to their users.

From my point of view compiler and libraries are the only critical thing on desktop these days ... and this should be addressed similar to the kernel - not with snap/flatpak or proprietary games with lots of ancient libraries and sporadic problems with current systems. It is same pain like working with proprietary drivers.

And using the latest stable kernel is something Linus Torvalds advertised really stongly.
Would be nice to see a real desktop distribution following this path - and LF doing there best to make it as pleasant as possible.
The fight for HW drivers - a compatibility list under Linux (or even "Linux ready" certification) - would be due ...
But maybe we will see improvements here someday - KDE neon seems to do it right concerning KDE as DE and its SW stack - much better than Kubuntu after my experience (even compared with 20.10 - not only 20.04).

And frequent kernels are really welcome - I have experienced several times improvements ... due to current HW used.

Six new stable kernels

Posted Nov 22, 2020 20:16 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Note for XFS users: 5.9.9 and 5.9.10 have a bad patch which can cause a nice oops with (an erroneous) fs corruption message.

Fixed upstream in eb8409071a1d47e3593cfe077107ac46853182ab, will doubtless hit -stable soon (but doesn't seem to be in the stable queue as I post this).

Thanks ever so much to Darrick Wong for diagnosing the crash on a Sunday evening. :) (if I'd had a brain I'd have checked master myself, because the fix has been there since yesterday, described as critical no less.)