Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] stable kernel process automation and improvement

Jiri Kosina
2019-07-08T11:35:23Z

On Mon, 8 Jul 2019, Sasha Levin wrote:
>
> >> If we were to start avoiding driver updates, it would act as an
> >> incentive for people not to upgrade their kernel.
> >
> >I'm not sure I follow the logic here?
>
> The way I see it, the lower your "effective delta" is between to
> kernels, the easier it is to move forward. For example, if I have a
> product that runs on 4.19 and uses all our core kernel code + 10
> drivers, and I know that those drivers had most of the fixes backported
> to my LTS tree, I'd feel much more confident going to 5.4 knowning that
> I already have most of the patches that come with 5.4.
>
> For me it's a matter of how one would budget a move from a kernel X LTS
> to kernel Y LTS, and I think that as that budget requirement grows it's
> actually harder to actually do it (and convince management), acting as a
> negative incentive to stay with whatever works now.

But where does the 'stable' aspect appear here?

I think it's reasonable to expect 'stable' to mean 'minimal number of
changes needed to maintain stability of the kernel', and that I believe
was the original purpose of stable tree.

Now you seem to be repurposing 'stable' as 'as close to upstream as
possible in order to minimize cost of version updates'.

I guess that's one of the reasons why distros are gradually turning away
from stable tree the main purpose of distros is to provide stability,
while it clearly is not minimizing acumulation of cost for future version
updates.

Thanks,

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs