Reaching out to Greg KH for 6 year LTS kernel versions

[Florian Fainelli]

On 8/10/22 15:27, Hauke Mehrtens wrote:
> On 8/9/22 01:15, Florian Fainelli wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Greg KH has communicated a few times before on his blog [1] that he is 
>> seeking the help of individuals and company to help him maintain the 
>> LTS kernels and allow them to be made 6 years instead of just the 
>> usual 2 years.
>>
>> 5.10 is a 6 year LTS, but 5.15 is not listed as such, although it 
>> certainly would make sense for it to be since we use 5.15 in OpenWrt.
>>
>> It would be good for the project to have a designated contact who can 
>> communicate the kernel version plan ahead of time, or once a LTS is 
>> picked up, we could sign up people to do regular testing of the stable 
>> release candidates?
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> [1]: 
>> http://kroah.com/log/blog/2021/02/03/helping-out-with-lts-kernel-releases/ 
>>
> 
> Hi Florian,
> 
> I saw that you are often testing the stable rc version, this is really 
> great. Someone could try to automate this in OpenWrt to automatically 
> test the stable RC kernel versions, but it probably still needs some 
> maintenance. Currently I do not see that we have the resources to do this.

Yes I do try to test the release candidates when they show up, although 
that is done on the limited set of devices I have at work and at home 
usually, so it won't catch all of the possible regressions, and the 
tests are limited to kselftests and some occasional one offs that are 
device specific.

> 
> I do not think OpenWrt needs 6 LTS years kernel support 3 to 4 years is 
> fine for OpenWrt. If we do the 22.03 stable release in the next week we 
> can declare 21.02 end of life by end of February 2023. We would have 
> used kernel 5.4 only a bit over 3 years after its initial release is 
> November 2019.

OK, the 3-4 years time frame is not something that we currently have 
with Linux kernels, it is either 2 years or 6 years, since 6 > 4, it 
sounds like we still have some interest in having 6 LTS kernels, but 
maybe not have every single LTS release be 6 years, right?

> 
> If you want to volunteer to help Greg KH more on this it would still be 
> nice.

I will continue to help with the stable candidates testing for the 
foreseeable future as it is largely automated and does not require much 
effort on my side, and will keep an open channel with Greg to tell him 
about what OpenWrt has selected.
-- 
Florian