[Bug 218006] [ext4] system panic when ext4_writepages:2918: Journal has aborted

[bugzilla-daemon@kernel.org]

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218006

--- Comment #6 from Theodore Tso (tytso@mit.edu) ---
Unfortunately the 4.14 kernel was released in 2017, which is over six years
ago.   Most companies where you can pay $$$ to get support for Linux
distributions based on 4.14 are EOL'ing products based on 4.14.   As far
upstream kernel developers who are essentially volunteers when people ask them
for free help, in general, upstream kernel developers do not support LTS
kernels, and certainly not an LTS kernel as old as 4.14.

If there is someone is willing to be the ext4 upstream stable backports
maintainer, then that person might be willing to provide limited support for
LTS kernels --- but the 4.14 LTS upstream kernel is planned to be EOL'ed in
January 2024, and I had stopped running gce-xfstests on 4.14 LTS kernels about
a year or so ago.  I barely have time to run gce-xfststs on LTS kernels for
6.1, 5.15 and 5.10 every quarter or two, and if someone were to volunteer to
become ext4 stable backports maintainer, I'd encourage them to focus on 6.6 and
6.1 LTS kernels, with 5.10 and 5.15 LTS kernels as a lower priority (because
most commercial companies are going to be moving off of 5.10 LTS in the near
future).   But volunteer support for 4.14 LTS?  TO be honest, that's extremely
unlikely.

*If* there is a company that has a misguided business reason to support the
4.14 LTS kernel, then of course an employee of that company can certainly fund
an engineer to to do all of the support that they need.  But quite frankly, I'd
be encouraging that company to rethink their business case for supporting the
4.14 kernel.   It would be probably far more cost effective to migrate their
customers to a non-pre-historic kernel such as the 6.6 LTS kernel.

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