Reaching out to Greg KH for 6 year LTS kernel versions

[Florian Fainelli]

On 8/10/22 13:32, Robert Marko wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Aug 2022 at 22:30, Philip Prindeville
> <philipp at redfish-solutions.com> wrote:
>>
>> Not to play the devil's advocate but... do we want old kernels hanging out that long?
>>
>> Besides not encouraging people to update to new releases that mitigate discovered CVE's, we'd also not pick up David Taht's excellent improvements in Buffer Bloat.
> 
> I have to agree with this.
> What would be the benefit for OpenWrt with having LTS kernels
> supported for 6 years?

One aspect I could see is take for instance a device that is widely 
popular amongst our user base as was TI's ar7 for instance a while back, 
and for which we might have done a Linux 5.4, or 5.10 version at the 
time but we do not wish to continue to maintain.

Being able to continue to deliver stable kernel updates in a stable 
OpenWrt branch could be a good way for users to pick up their next xDSL 
router since there are not so many out there that can actually run 
OpenWrt compared to pure Wired/Wi-Fi for instance.

> Backporting stuff is already hard with only 2 LTS versions supported in OpenWrt.

That argument I am sympathetic with, and the sheer amount of out of tree 
patches we have in OpenWrt is not helping, in fact it definitively makes 
it harder to regularly test, but still somehow we managed to do it.

Since we will merge stable updates eventually, the point would be that 
instead of testing those that are already released, we could try to test 
the release candidates and report back anything we find?
-- 
Florian