Some weekend stable kernel updates

Posted Jan 22, 2024 10:37 UTC (Mon) by helmut.schmidt (subscriber, #113671)
In reply to: Some weekend stable kernel updates by willy
Parent article: Some weekend stable kernel updates

> I mean, these are not new observations. There's a general "I don't care about stable" attitude amongst maintainers. To a certain extent that's fair; this really is the job of distribution maintainers, except that it's really hard to have domain experts on staff at each distro. And those who are on staff also have their own projects to work on.
> Nobody who's currently a maintainer signed up for the extra work of backporting fixes to stable kernels.

Agreed. The point I'm raising is about the autosel process determining which patches make it into stable releases. I know, that it is the general consensus that it's beneficial overall, despite the occasional mistakes, because without it many crucial patches would be missed. But every mistake feeds my doubt.

> But the fact is that users don't run top of tree, and we don't really want them to.

Why not?

Ideally, if mainline wouldn't break things, there was no need for stable kernels.

Some weekend stable kernel updates

Posted Jan 22, 2024 14:06 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> because without it many crucial patches would be missed.

This is the core of the discussion: is it better to avoid missing patches at the cost of occasionally including a bad one, or is it better to avoid including bad patches at the cost of occasionally missing a good one?

> Ideally, if mainline wouldn't break things, there was no need for stable kernels.

Breaking things is hard to avoid, since mainline always has a large amount of large changes. The nice thing about stable kernels is that they (are supposed to) only apply minor patches on top of mainline which gradually fix most of the breakage caused by the large changes.

The best of both worlds is probably to follow a bit behind mainline, waiting for a few stable releases before jumping to a new mainline release (but never staying behind for too long). That is the approach used for instance by Fedora; at the moment, it's at 6.6.12 moving to 6.6.13 (according to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/).