Eight new stable kernels

[Posted January 27, 2022 by jake]

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.16.3, 5.15.17, 5.10.94, 5.4.174, 4.19.226, 4.14.263, 4.9.298, and 4.4.300 stable kernels. These all contain a huge number of fixes all over the tree, so huge that 5.16.3 broke the scripts used to create stable kernels; users should upgrade.

Eight new stable kernels

Posted Jan 27, 2022 16:57 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link] (2 responses)

1,033 patches on 5.16.3! That's properly enormous, indeed. Question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? I.e., is the kernel community proactively finding and fixing issues at an ever more impressive rate, or is there are quality control issue creeping in here?

Eight new stable kernels

Posted Jan 27, 2022 17:14 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Yeah, to me anyway, that seriously strains the definition of "stable".

Eight new stable kernels

Posted Jan 28, 2022 19:58 UTC (Fri) by mrchapp (guest, #128908) [Link]

We (Linaro's LKFT, [1]) test the linux-5.16.y series and ran 90,000+ tests on this particular release candidate [2] across a bunch of test devices. We regularly report problems with the release candidates, and did in fact report regressions in about 18% of the RC's of 2021. All of those problems are resolved.

We are expanding our test coverage, but there are more community participants (individual users and test farms) that also look after the stable series.

[1] https://lkft.linaro.org/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/stable/ddd3f2e1-ed1d-82ce-cc8e-56...

Eight new stable kernels

Posted Jan 28, 2022 14:12 UTC (Fri) by birdie (guest, #114905) [Link] (2 responses)

Human readable changelogs are here:

https://www.opennet.ru/kernel/5.16.3.html
https://www.opennet.ru/kernel/5.15.17.html

LWN continues to post something which no one reads because these mailing list messages/git log dumps are horrible.

Eight new stable kernels

Posted Jan 28, 2022 17:14 UTC (Fri) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

That’s not exactly what I would call “human readable”, unless you think (kernel) programmers are the only humans…

An example of a “human readable” changelog for the first patch in both changelogs would be: “Fix WiFi for GPD win and GPD pocket devices.”

Most humans don’t care why something didn’t work or how you fixed it (or why you fixed it that specific way). They only care about their hardware & software working as intended.

Eight new stable kernels

Posted Jan 29, 2022 21:30 UTC (Sat) by samlh (subscriber, #56788) [Link]

Ok - "programmer readable", then, perhaps? (I'm fine with not being human :p)

On a more serious note, I did find the links birdie posted to be quite a bit more pleasant to glance through than trying to read the original emails - sorting, formatting, and linkifying goes a long way.