[cip-dev] Introduction

Daniel Sangorrin
2016-09-16T05:15:34Z

Hi Paul,

> To introduce myself, I'm CEO at Codethink, but to the best of my
> ability I'll be commenting here from a personal perspective, independent
> of Codethink's official involvement in CIP.
>
> To start the ball rolling, I'm personally worried about how we are
> actually going to achieve super-long-term-support and am happy that we
> can discuss the issues in public.
>
> Greg K-H, Ben Hutchings and others have contributed a huge amount to
> Long Term Stable and followon initiatives in the community over the
> years. But when I first started exploring how things like LTS and LTSI
> can work for embedded and automotive in 2012/2013, I hit some
> fundamental questions, not least - how in practice can a complex
> embedded project consume a 'stable' kernel that's being released **
> every couple of weeks ** with the words 'users of this series must
> upgrade'? I presented some work at an automotive GENIVI event in Oct
> 2013 [1] but the audience at that time literally refused to accept that
> the idea of whole-of-life updates.

As for the embedded systems I deal with, a 2-weeks release is definitely not
required. A 6 six months cycle, complemented with aperiodic patch releases
for really *important* issues, would be good enough.
Of course, different use cases may have different requirements so we
will probably need to reach a consensus on that.

> And as Greg said at the time:
>
> "The patches that apply for stuff after 2 years drops off dramatically,
> and the work involved in keeping stuff working and testing for problems
> increases greatly.?
> Just yesterday there was a very interesting post about backports and
> long term stable kernels on LWN [2]. Greg is quoted there considering:
>
> "But if we didn't provide an LTS, would companies constantly update
> their kernels to newer releases to keep up with the security and
> bugfixes? That goes against everything those managers/PMs have ever been
> used to in the past, yet it's actually the best thing they could do."
>
> I've been recommending the constant update route route to customers
> over the last few years, with some success, but many ecosystem members
> are extremely uncomfortable with the whole idea of aligning with
> mainline. I think this is broadly because as embedded engineers we've
> learned over many years that it's best to change the platform as little
> as possible. I wrote an article trying to challenge this traditional
> embedded thinking earlier this year [3]

Thanks, interesting article.

" All of which makes perfect sense for traditional embedded projects."

I just wanted to clarify that these 'traditional embedded projects' are actually
in the scope of the CIP project. I believe embedded systems where
continuous updates are hard to implement, should still benefit from other
CIP activities (e.g. testing, RAS, real-time partitioning support or kernel
self-protection).

Best regards,
Daniel

>
> Would be very interested in others' thoughts on this.
>
> br
> Paul
>
> [1]
> http://www.devcurmudgeon.com/pdfs/mainline-lts-ltsi-genivi-20131025.pdf
> [2] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/700557/091f804480fab479/
> [3] http://www.devcurmudgeon.com/technical-debt-for-whole-systems.html
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