[elrepo-devel] Kernel-lt for EL6 and EL7

[Alan Bartlett]

On 22 March 2016 at 07:56, Akemi Yagi <amyagi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 9:47 AM, Alan Bartlett <ajb at elrepo.org> wrote:
>>
>> Just concluding this brief conversation by thanking everyone for their
>> contributions and saying that the plans are --
>>
>> For EL6: To migrate to a kernel-lt-3.18.X series once the linux-3.10.X
>> branch has been declared at EOL.
>>
>> For EL7: Not to provide a kernel-lt at this time but to review the
>> situation in about 6 months.
>>
>> Alan.
>
>
> It is about the time to revisit this discussion!
>
> Akemi

Revisiting this discussion (as directed, above) . . .

For EL6 there is no change to the plan announced in October 2015:

"To migrate to a kernel-lt-3.18.X series once the linux-3.10.X branch
has been declared at EOL."

For EL7, six months have now passed and it is time to review the
situation. As of yesterday morning there had not been any significant
requests for a kernel-lt package set. Later in the day a request was
received --

http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2016-March/003024.html

That request prompted me to consider the upstream status of the
various branches of the Linux kernel sources. Looking at the
"releases" page [1] the following can been seen:

[quote]
Longterm release kernels

Version Maintainer         Released   Projected EOL

4.4     Greg Kroah-Hartman 2016-01-10 Feb, 2018
4.1     Sasha Levin        2015-06-21 Sep, 2017
3.18    Sasha Levin        2014-12-07 Jan, 2017
3.14    Greg Kroah-Hartman 2014-03-30 Aug, 2016
3.12    Jiri Slaby         2013-11-03 2016
3.10    Greg Kroah-Hartman 2013-06-30 End of 2015
3.4     Li Zefan           2012-05-20 Sep, 2016
3.2     Ben Hutchings      2012-01-04 May, 2018
[/quote]

Informal discussions have identified that a kernel-lt package set for
EL7 should be built from a 4.X source branch.

The above table shows two options and my initial thought was to use
the earliest available branch, that of 4.1. Considering the projected
EOL for both 4.1 and 4.4, neither really looks to be as long term as I
would like. So after another period of reflection I have decided to
base the EL7 kernel-lt package set on the 4.4.X source branch.

Your comments will be appreciated, please.

Alan.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html