Some weekend stable kernel updates
Some weekend stable kernel updates
Posted Jan 22, 2024 14:06 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)In reply to: Some weekend stable kernel updates by helmut.schmidt
Parent article: Some weekend stable kernel updates
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/).