[OpenWrt-Devel] OpenWrt 20.X release plans

[Peter Geis]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 6:01 PM Hauke Mehrtens <hauke at hauke-m.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I meet with jow about 2 weeks ago and we talked about a lot of OpenWrt
> related stuff, one of the topics was the release after 19.07.
>
> As the 19.07 release is now done, I would like to follow up on this topic.
>
> We thought that the time between the 19.07 branch and the final release
> was way too long, this should be much shorter in the next release, we
> should target 8 weeks for that.
>
> My preferred timeline would the the following:
> * Beginning of February: freeze master for big changes (adding new
> boards is no problem)
> * Beginning of March: branch off 20.3 release branch
> * 1 week after the branch was created: tag and build 20.3-rc1
> * 3 weeks later tag and build 20.3-rc2
> * 3 weeks later tag and build 20.3 final
>
> Then we would do the next final release in May 2020.
>
> This plan is based on using kernel 4.19, if we use kernel 5.4 I would
> assume we have to shift all dates by 3 months, so branch off in
> beginning of June and final release in August.
>
> Koen is working on adding generic 5.4 support and also some targets are
> already ported, I assume the generic part should be finished soon:
> https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/staging/xback.git;a=shortlog
>
> We had a longer discussion which kernel to use here:
> https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2019-November/020403.html
> There was also a discussion about this in IRC some days ago.
>
> I think we will get some years of LTS support for both versions, as
> Android will probably use kernel 4.19 and 5.4 and then Google wants to
> have LTS support from Greg Kroah-Hartman & Sasha Levin. Support for
> kernel 4.19 was announced till December 2020, but it is used in Debian
> and in the past Ben Hutchings took over and maintained Debian kernels
> longer, like he still does for kernel 3.16. For previous kernel versions
> the 5 year LTS support was also announced later.
>
> I am fine with kernel 4.19 or 5.4, but we should decide and not stay in
> a limbo for log, so we can work io the right direction.
>
> If we decide for kernel 4.19 I am fine with adding kernel 5.4 support to
> master and add it as testing kernel to some targets in master. We can
> then branch off the next release in October with kernel 5.4.

Good Evening,

I know I'm relatively new to this community, so take my input with a
grain of salt.
I think it is wise to target 4.19 as it has been in the nightly
releases, and as such has been in testing.
Once that change is in place, target 5.4 for the nightly releases.
This will allow 5.4 to be tested by those who are willing to run the
bleeding edge, before the 21.x release.

I must say though I'm sad with the 4/32 support loss, as I have openwrt on a
Netgear WN3000RP v3, and with zram enabled it's orders of magnitude
better than stock.

>
> It would be nice to have jails activated by default, but there are still
> problems when using an initramfs, I will probably not have the time to
> investigate into this problem in the next 4 weeks.
>
> Should wpad-openssl or better wpad-wolfssl (after it works with WPA3) be
> added as default wpad version now? If we do this we can also activate
> https support for luci by default https support should not cost much
> space when we already have an ssl library.
>
> Are there any other bigger changes planned you would like to get into
> the next release?

It would be nice to have lxd support in the full release, instead of
needing to custom build to enable support.

>
> Should we do a vote on the kernel version and release plan in the end?
> The most important thing to get this done is that someone takes care and
> does the branching, releasing and keeping an overview.
>
> Hauke
>
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