Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[Robin P. Blanchard]

Given that GHK is extending support for LTS kernels to six years, what
will the landscape of ELREPO look like? eg

4.4 LTS
4.9 LTS
4.14 LTS
4.19 LTS


On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 2:12 PM Phil Perry  wrote:
>
> On 14/02/18 16:54, David Ranch wrote:
> >
> > This is an interesting point.
> >
> > I'd argue that in many respects, the ElRepo group is one of the primary
> > reasons I've stayed on with Centos as it gives me newer kernels than
> > what Redhat/Centos will.  Packages is an entirely different discussion
> > and I digress.  Understanding all that, the 4.4.x kernels are already
> > quite old.  I don't have a good understanding of all the work that goes
> > on behind the scenes for the ElRepo team to release new LT and ML
> > packages but would it be possible to add more LT kernels?  Maybe not all
> > three of them but maybe 4.4 (for the conservative people), 4.14 (for the
> > people who need a long life yet want a mostly modern kernel, and then
> > the ML line for the bleeding edge users?  I know this becomes more and
> > more additive over the years but maybe a little more can be done to keep
> > Centos up to date?
> >
> > --David
> >
>
> Alan is the only one able to give a definitive answer on this, as he is
> the one who does all the hard work, but seeing the amount of work it
> takes to maintain two package sets over 2 distros (was 3 until el5 was
> recently retired, and will be 3 again once el8 is released), and
> multiple arch's, I'd say it's very unlikely.
>
> I'd also question the rationale. kernel-ml is the cutting edge offering,
> and kernel-lt is the LTS offering based upon what is available at the
> time and has LTS support. A key attribute of Enterprise Linux/LTS is we
> provide version stability; we do not change it unless we absolutely have
> to. That is a fundamental cornerstone of the concept of Enterprise Linux.
>
> I appreciate kernel-lt-4.4 may be starting to look long in the tooth in
> some areas, but that is inevitable with any LTS kernel. Interestingly,
> there will reach a point where what started out in life being a newer
> offering (kernel-lt vs the distro kernel) will actually end up reverting
> to the complete opposite. For example, consider wifi support and the
> wifi stack. The EL7 distro kernel started life as 3.10. The wifi stack
> has undergone various backported updates through 3.16 in el7.1, 4.1 in
> el7.2, 4.7 in el7.3, 4.11 in el7.4 and most recently 4.14 in the
> el7.5(beta) kernel, so we see in this respect the distro kernel actually
> becomes 'newer' than kernel-lt by the el7.3 release. This will no doubt
> be happening in other areas as well, so I would fully expect some
> kernel-lt users to revert to using the distro kernel again as time passes.
>
> By the time kernel-4.4 is out of LTS, a successor will be chosen to
> replace it based upon what is available and most suitable at the time,
> and will hopefully see out the 10 year life of the distro. Also, I
> consider kernel-4.14 a poor choice for LTS at present given there is
> only a commitment upstream to support for another 2 years whereas
> kernel-4.4 has a commitment to support for another 4 years.
>
> Ultimately, elrepo aims to offer some extra choice in a convenient
> packaged format where there was none before. Given the amount of work
> Alan puts in to developing and maintaining these packages, I would say
> he is operating at his limit in providing the 2 package sets currently
> available, and given that, I consider the current offerings to be a good
> compromise for the reasons outlined above. That said, if anyone wants to
> maintain a kernel-lt-4.14 offering, they are free to do so given Alan
> has already done a lot of the development work. One could take his last
> kernel-ml-4.14 SRPM, rename to kernel-whatever-4.14 and drop in the
> latest 4.14.x tarball and maintain it for the rest of the 4.14 branch
> life, assuming one has suitable el6/7 build systems and the willingness
> to commit to regularly building a relatively large numbers of kernel
> releases.
>
> In the meantime, if Alan has a differing view, I'm sure he will tell us :-)
>
> Phil
>
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Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[Phil Perry]

On 14/02/18 16:54, David Ranch wrote:


This is an interesting point.

I'd argue that in many respects, the ElRepo group is one of the primary 
reasons I've stayed on with Centos as it gives me newer kernels than 
what Redhat/Centos will.  Packages is an entirely different discussion 
and I digress.  Understanding all that, the 4.4.x kernels are already 
quite old.  I don't have a good understanding of all the work that goes 
on behind the scenes for the ElRepo team to release new LT and ML 
packages but would it be possible to add more LT kernels?  Maybe not all 
three of them but maybe 4.4 (for the conservative people), 4.14 (for the 
people who need a long life yet want a mostly modern kernel, and then 
the ML line for the bleeding edge users?  I know this becomes more and 
more additive over the years but maybe a little more can be done to keep 
Centos up to date?


--David



Alan is the only one able to give a definitive answer on this, as he is 
the one who does all the hard work, but seeing the amount of work it 
takes to maintain two package sets over 2 distros (was 3 until el5 was 
recently retired, and will be 3 again once el8 is released), and 
multiple arch's, I'd say it's very unlikely.


I'd also question the rationale. kernel-ml is the cutting edge offering, 
and kernel-lt is the LTS offering based upon what is available at the 
time and has LTS support. A key attribute of Enterprise Linux/LTS is we 
provide version stability; we do not change it unless we absolutely have 
to. That is a fundamental cornerstone of the concept of Enterprise Linux.


I appreciate kernel-lt-4.4 may be starting to look long in the tooth in 
some areas, but that is inevitable with any LTS kernel. Interestingly, 
there will reach a point where what started out in life being a newer 
offering (kernel-lt vs the distro kernel) will actually end up reverting 
to the complete opposite. For example, consider wifi support and the 
wifi stack. The EL7 distro kernel started life as 3.10. The wifi stack 
has undergone various backported updates through 3.16 in el7.1, 4.1 in 
el7.2, 4.7 in el7.3, 4.11 in el7.4 and most recently 4.14 in the 
el7.5(beta) kernel, so we see in this respect the distro kernel actually 
becomes 'newer' than kernel-lt by the el7.3 release. This will no doubt 
be happening in other areas as well, so I would fully expect some 
kernel-lt users to revert to using the distro kernel again as time passes.


By the time kernel-4.4 is out of LTS, a successor will be chosen to 
replace it based upon what is available and most suitable at the time, 
and will hopefully see out the 10 year life of the distro. Also, I 
consider kernel-4.14 a poor choice for LTS at present given there is 
only a commitment upstream to support for another 2 years whereas 
kernel-4.4 has a commitment to support for another 4 years.


Ultimately, elrepo aims to offer some extra choice in a convenient 
packaged format where there was none before. Given the amount of work 
Alan puts in to developing and maintaining these packages, I would say 
he is operating at his limit in providing the 2 package sets currently 
available, and given that, I consider the current offerings to be a good 
compromise for the reasons outlined above. That said, if anyone wants to 
maintain a kernel-lt-4.14 offering, they are free to do so given Alan 
has already done a lot of the development work. One could take his last 
kernel-ml-4.14 SRPM, rename to kernel-whatever-4.14 and drop in the 
latest 4.14.x tarball and maintain it for the rest of the 4.14 branch 
life, assuming one has suitable el6/7 build systems and the willingness 
to commit to regularly building a relatively large numbers of kernel 
releases.


In the meantime, if Alan has a differing view, I'm sure he will tell us :-)

Phil

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Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[Akemi Yagi]

On Feb 14, 2018 08:54, "David Ranch"  wrote:


This is an interesting point.

I'd argue that in many respects, the ElRepo group is one of the primary
reasons I've stayed on with Centos as it gives me newer kernels than what
Redhat/Centos will.  Packages is an entirely different discussion and I
digress.  Understanding all that, the 4.4.x kernels are already quite old.
I don't have a good understanding of all the work that goes on behind the
scenes for the ElRepo team to release new LT and ML packages but would it
be possible to add more LT kernels?  Maybe not all three of them but maybe
4.4 (for the conservative people), 4.14 (for the people who need a long
life yet want a mostly modern kernel, and then the ML line for the bleeding
edge users?  I know this becomes more and more additive over the years but
maybe a little more can be done to keep Centos up to date?

--David

Just a note to let people know that the CentOS Project provides kernel 4.9.

Akemi
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Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[David Ranch]

This is an interesting point.

I'd argue that in many respects, the ElRepo group is one of the primary 
reasons I've stayed on with Centos as it gives me newer kernels than 
what Redhat/Centos will.  Packages is an entirely different discussion 
and I digress.  Understanding all that, the 4.4.x kernels are already 
quite old.  I don't have a good understanding of all the work that goes 
on behind the scenes for the ElRepo team to release new LT and ML 
packages but would it be possible to add more LT kernels?  Maybe not all 
three of them but maybe 4.4 (for the conservative people), 4.14 (for the 
people who need a long life yet want a mostly modern kernel, and then 
the ML line for the bleeding edge users?  I know this becomes more and 
more additive over the years but maybe a little more can be done to keep 
Centos up to date?


--David


On 02/13/2018 12:23 PM, Leon Fauster via elrepo wrote:

Am 13.02.2018 um 20:42 schrieb Robin P. Blanchard :

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Phil Perry  wrote:

kernel-ml is the *current* mainline kernel release. It was 4.14 until 4.15.0
was released. It will be 4.15.x until 4.16.0 is released, and so on.

If you want to stay on a single LTS branch, you want kernel-lt which is
currently 4.4.x, and will stay as 4.4.x as long as the 4.4 branch is
supported upstream by kernel.org.


Thanks, Phil.

I was under the impression that 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4 were all LTS branches.

Yes, longterm on kernel.org

elrepo.org is maintaining only two branches "longterm" (4.4 until 2022) and 
"mainline" (latest of kernel.org).


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Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[Leon Fauster via elrepo]

> Am 14.02.2018 um 15:22 schrieb Robin P. Blanchard :
> 
> Thank you. This better answers my question.
> 
> Is there any discussion/movement to transition elrepo's LTS branch to
> 4.14? I ask simply because 4.11+ delivers support for modern SMB
> dialects (https://marc.info/?l=linux-cifs=149760399614057=2).


These kernel packages are not for production systems.

Every release has following subtext: 

> These packages are provided "As-Is" with no implied warranty or
> support. Using the kernel-ml may expose your system to security,
> performance and/or data corruption issues. 

and

> We provide these kernels for hardware testing in an effort to identify
> new/updated drivers which can then be targeted for backporting as kmod
> packages. Meanwhile, these kernels may provide interim relief to
> people with non-functional hardware. We stress that we consider such
> kernels as a last resort for those who are unable to get their
> hardware working using the RHEL-6/7 kernel with supplementary kmod
> packages.


If your system/service must be based on 4.11+ kernel then choose a 
corresponding distribution.

BTW - EL upstream does some backports 
https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/ .
Maybe your requirement is addressed by the current distro kernel or could be 
requested to
get backported here https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ .

--
LF

 
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Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[Robin P. Blanchard]

Thank you. This better answers my question.

Is there any discussion/movement to transition elrepo's LTS branch to
4.14? I ask simply because 4.11+ delivers support for modern SMB
dialects (https://marc.info/?l=linux-cifs=149760399614057=2).

Thanks in advance.

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 2:23 PM, Leon Fauster via elrepo
 wrote:
>
>> Am 13.02.2018 um 20:42 schrieb Robin P. Blanchard 
>> :
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Phil Perry  wrote:
>>>
>>> kernel-ml is the *current* mainline kernel release. It was 4.14 until 4.15.0
>>> was released. It will be 4.15.x until 4.16.0 is released, and so on.
>>>
>>> If you want to stay on a single LTS branch, you want kernel-lt which is
>>> currently 4.4.x, and will stay as 4.4.x as long as the 4.4 branch is
>>> supported upstream by kernel.org.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks, Phil.
>>
>> I was under the impression that 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4 were all LTS branches.
>
> Yes, longterm on kernel.org
>
> elrepo.org is maintaining only two branches "longterm" (4.4 until 2022) and 
> "mainline" (latest of kernel.org).
>
> --
> LF
>
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Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[Leon Fauster via elrepo]

> Am 13.02.2018 um 20:42 schrieb Robin P. Blanchard :
> 
> On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Phil Perry  wrote:
>> 
>> kernel-ml is the *current* mainline kernel release. It was 4.14 until 4.15.0
>> was released. It will be 4.15.x until 4.16.0 is released, and so on.
>> 
>> If you want to stay on a single LTS branch, you want kernel-lt which is
>> currently 4.4.x, and will stay as 4.4.x as long as the 4.4 branch is
>> supported upstream by kernel.org.
>> 
> 
> Thanks, Phil.
> 
> I was under the impression that 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4 were all LTS branches.

Yes, longterm on kernel.org

elrepo.org is maintaining only two branches "longterm" (4.4 until 2022) and 
"mainline" (latest of kernel.org).

--
LF

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Re: [elrepo] 4.14 LTS

[Robin P. Blanchard]

Thanks, Phil.

I was under the impression that 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4 were all LTS branches.

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Phil Perry  wrote:
> On 13/02/18 13:13, Robin P. Blanchard wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Have the builds stopped/broke for 4.14.x ?
>> https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.14.19
>>
>> I see 4.15.x being updated
>> (https://elrepo.org/linux/kernel/el7/x86_64/RPMS/), but not 4.14?
>>
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>
>
> Hi Robin,
>
> kernel-ml is the *current* mainline kernel release. It was 4.14 until 4.15.0
> was released. It will be 4.15.x until 4.16.0 is released, and so on.
>
> If you want to stay on a single LTS branch, you want kernel-lt which is
> currently 4.4.x, and will stay as 4.4.x as long as the 4.4 branch is
> supported upstream by kernel.org.
>
> Hope that makes sense
>
> Phil
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