Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 5 Dec 2005 12:34:20 +0100 | From | Willy Tarreau <> | Subject | Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel |
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On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 11:55:36AM +0100, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote: > On 2005-12-05T07:26:09, Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org> wrote: > > > What I think should be done is to still maintain older 2.6 > > (eg: 2, 3 or 4 previous releases) so that people will have > > the time to switch to a new one. And I think that what Adrian > > wants to do would be useful *only* if he proceeds that way. > > > > Maybe you should just join forces, eg Chris and you to catch > > new patches, and Adrian to merge them to older kernels ? Every > > software maker always supports a few older releases for the > > people who need to stay on something stable, and it is clearly > > what is missing now in 2.6. > > Well, this is probably the most useful suggestion so far. The kernel is > free land; if you or someone else wants to maintain the upcoming 2.6.16 > "forever", and backport fixes or selected features, by all means, do it. > Define your policy, set up a tree, and off you go. > > If Adrian will maintain it, it'll for sure be the most static kernel > ever. > > This won't impact the Linux kernel, which will just continue to run its > course. The kernel process as a whole doesn't need to change; just > someone needs to do the grunt work. > > If your kernel is wildly successful and adopted by users as well as > distributions, you'll be very happy and tell us 'told ya so!'. If not, > no harm will be done either, and you'll have the kernel you want for > your own purposes. > > Be aware however that this is a very painful job. Trust me, I've been > involved with the receiving end of maintaining such a kernel for SLES > for a couple of releases. ;-) > > Which is exactly the point: it's so painful that for this, people want > to be paid, and don't like doing it in their spare time. You may > maintain it for 6 months, sure, which will be less painful than > maintaining it for 5, 7 years, but when you rebase, you'll still put > your users into the dependency hell, and they won't have tested the > intermediate releases... Ouch. Not to mention that not every backported > fix is trivial to do. > > Anyway, good luck to you. > > The current 2.6.x.y-stable series is quite sane, because they are > essentially just fixing very critical bugs in very recent kernels, with > little back porting effort.
I agree it is sane. The problem is that it does not exist for long enough. When you have 2.6.14.X working perfectly and you need a fix for a newly discovered security fix which only exists in 2.6.15.Y, then you have to leave 2.6.14 and enter 2.6.15. That is the problem, because for just a fix, you change megabytes of source code which will bring their equivalent in bugs.
Regards, willy
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