Re: [cip-dev] 4.4.X-stable and 4.4.X-rt maintainance ends in less than two weeks

Jan Kiszka
2022-01-24T14:01:09Z

On 20.01.22 03:26, Masami Ichikawa wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 11:12 PM Pavel Machek <pavel@denx.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> It looks like stable 4.4.X maintainence ends real soon now:
>> https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html . I talked to Greg and
>> it seems like plan is to end it at the beggining of month, rather than
>> end.
>>
>
> Thank you for asking the actual EOL date.
>
>> That means we'll be on our own maintaining -cip and -cip-rt versions.
>>
>> To review our 4.4 branch:
>>
>> git log --pretty=oneline linux-4.4.y-cip-rebase
>>
>> We have 757 patches on top of 4.4.216, and there are some 14000
>> patches between 4.4 and 4.4.216. Going forward, most new patches will
>> come from upstream.
>>
>> We do some compile testing, but we only run run-time tests on two
>> targets:
>> https://gitlab.com/cip-project/cip-kernel/linux-cip/-/pipelines/448669210
>> .
>>
>> Given that most of work we'll be doing will be maintaining -stable
>> patches, anyway, I believe it would make sense to step up as official
>> maintainers of 4.4.X-stable and 4.4.X-rt series. We'll need to do the
>> work, anyway, keeping -stable and -cip split will not result in much
>> overhead for us, and this way we'll get a lot of visibility for the
>> project, and hopefully a lot of additional testing.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
>
> I agree. The split -stable and -cip work sounds reasonable.
> I think it would be helpful, if AUTOSEL system continues to pick
> patches for 4.4 series.
>

I do agree that, if we need to integrate patches anyway, providing them
as a prolonged LTS should not be extra effort. But what will and can
people expect from that?

The original LTS kernels conceptually covers everything that is
code-wise included. Our CIP kernels do not. While it might be still ok
to fix trivial build issues or even runtime problems for things CIP does
not cover in the configs when they only occasionally occur, we will not
be able to commit on doing that all the time - resources are limited,
and the focus needs to be on CIP-defined setups.

Jan

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