Reaching out to Greg KH for 6 year LTS kernel versions

[Robert Marko]

On Fri, 12 Aug 2022 at 19:54, Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

I dont see how this is related to LTS kernel support.

>
> 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.

I can agree with this.

>
> > 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?

This is a good idea, not sure how we can do it within OpenWrt though with
the amount of patches we have that make it a pain to bump kernels.

Regards,
Robert
> --
> Florian