Hi, Simon, Thank you for notifying us of your continued use of the Nios II architecture.
On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 10:24 AM Simon Schuster <[email protected]> wrote: > Unfortunately, as we are an infrastructure provider for civil energy > infrastructure, the refurbishment cycle is a bit slower than for > traditional consumer systems. This implies that the traditional LTS > support duration (max. Dec 2028 as of writing [1]) is rather short, and > we would be glad if we could keep the architecture in mainline for at > least 5 years and only then "decay" to LTS. Your reasoning makes complete sense. However, there is an alternative to maintaining the architecture in mainline. The Civil Infrastructure Platform project maintains super-LTS kernels (and a set of base Debian packages) for 10 years. They are intended to be used for exactly these kinds of devices. See here: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/civilinfrastructureplatform/start#kernel_maintainership and here: https://cip-project.org/about/linux-kernel-core-packages CIP will maintain kernel 6.12 until 2035. Is this long enough for your lifecycle? What kernel are you currently using? If it's newer than 6.12, we can easily wait until the next CIP SLTS release to remove Nios II support to avoid a downgrade. One important thing to note is that the default CIP kernel branches are not equivalent to standard LTS branches and include new hardware support, which has a higher likelihood of introducing regressions. However, the -st branches do not include these changes and follow the same patch acceptance rules as standard LTS, so they are likely a better fit for your use case. Also, CIP focuses on architectures used by CIP members - currently I think they are x86 (32 and 64-bit), ARM (32 and 64-bit) and RISC-V. Since Siemens is already a CIP member, you can simply ask them to add Nios II to the list, and you can assist them with testing and directly submit patches to them once the standard 6.12 LTS period ends. I hope this information helps you decide on the best course of action. Ethan
