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On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 10:41 PM Philip Webb <purslow@××××××××.net> wrote: |
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> |
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> 180626 Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> > On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 8:58 PM Philip Webb <purslow@××××××××.net> wrote: |
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> >> Does anyone know why the latest stable version of Gentoo-sources is 4.9.xx ? |
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> >> I installed 4.9.16 , which I continue to use, on 2017-04-06 . |
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> >> The tree contains versions of 4.14 4.16 4.17 , but all are still testing. |
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> > I tend to just use my own upstream kernels. I'm following the 4.14 longterm |
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> > and generally update within a few days of any release. |
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> > That said, I have been burned by the odd regression. |
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> |
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> Thanks for the other info (snipped). All Vanilla-sources are testing, |
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> which seems to correspond to your "upstream" kernels. |
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I use them directly from upstream: |
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git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git |
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They keep a branch for each longterm which makes updating easy. That |
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said, sticking with gentoo-sources certainly won't hurt. |
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> What does this say re recent kernel development or Gentoo's kernel team ? |
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> -- very quick thanks as always to Gentoo's volunteer developers, |
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> but something seems to be going astray here (smile). |
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I don't really see many issues with the Gentoo kernel team. The |
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choice of which longterm to follow is one that has pros and cons, and |
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they're following 4.9 deliberately because of issues some have had |
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with 4.14. MANY distros make decisions like this, and to some degree |
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it seems to be encouraged by the stable upstream kernel maintainers as |
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well who seem to view distros as another line of QA. |
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Within a longterm I'm surprised they aren't a bit more up-to-date, but |
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the reality is that the stable team has been issuing more than one |
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stable release every week for a while now. That is a VERY fast |
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cadence and I've been burned by just following this as their own |
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regression testing seems a bit limited. If the Gentoo kernel team is |
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taking its time to keyword these releases to do actual QA I certainly |
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won't fault them for that, and presumably they push through security |
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updates. |
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None of this is really meant to cast blame on upstream either. |
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Regression testing the kernel seems like a difficult prospect because |
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of all the potential hardware-related issues. Maybe better software |
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regression testing would be possible (filesystems, system calls, etc), |
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but I think a monolithic kernel is always going to be problematic in |
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this regard. (Even with a microkernel a failure of your IOMMU driver |
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or something like that isn't exactly something you can gracefully |
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contain...) |
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-- |
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Rich |
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