[elrepo] any plans for kernel 4.9 LTS

[Phil Perry]

On 09/09/17 15:29, lejeczek via elrepo wrote:
> 
> 
> On 08/09/17 18:03, Phil Perry wrote:
>> On 08/09/17 12:15, lejeczek via elrepo wrote:
>>> hi guys/gals
>>>
>>> any plans to land 4.9 in the repo would you know?
>>>
>>> many thanks, L.
>>
>> No, not at present. The current LTS versions are 3.10 for el6 and 4.4 
>> for el7, and there are no plans to change that until support for those 
>> kernel versions expire, at which point we will look for suitable 
>> replacements. The whole point of a LTS offering is that we don't 
>> change it unless we have to.
>>
> 
> If you, or any of elrepo's maintainer, are by any chance a subscriber to 
> LVM mailing list - I sought some help there recently - then check a 
> thread "raid - how to read this?".
> And these are Redhat guys there say about kernel versions and what they 
> say we should consider as a deal-maker/breaker as many, most(?) of us 
> use our boxes for some sort of storage, certainly I did therefore am 
> looking for "good" & newer kernel version.
> 

I am not subscribed I'm afraid.

Firstly I would draw your attention to the release notes accompanying 
all elrepo kernel releases which states these packages are provided 
"As-Is" for testing purposes and are not intended for production use.

If you want a production kernel then you should be using the RHEL distro 
kernel as this is exactly it's intended usage. Many of the kernel 
subsystems are updated (backported) from the latest upstream kernel 
whilst maintaining a stable kernel ABI over the product lifetime. This 
is what Red Hat would recommend and fully support.

Secondly, if you want a newer kernel, that is the purpose of the 
mainline kernel offering, kernel-ml. The LTS offering (kernel-lt) by 
definition is never going to be "newer".

So you have at least 4 options offered to you (distro kernel, kernel-lt 
(4.4), kernel-ml (4.13), and the 4.9 CentOS kernel offering). Hopefully 
one of those meets your requirements. I don't see a current need for 
elrepo to duplicate the efforts of the CentOS project in offering 
another 4.9 based kernel.

But all of this is irrelevant as elrepo policy is to offer one kernel-lt 
package until such time as it is end of life, which is currently 
predicted to be Jan 2018 for the 4.4 kernel branch. So until that time, 
any discussion on the matter is meaningless. If you want to join elrepo, 
and commit the time to build and maintain a 4.9 kernel branch until end 
of life then we can talk about that, but IMHO it would make more sense 
to direct such efforts towards the CentOS Project who already have such 
a product up and running.