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This is the same problem shared by RedHat customers, although RH is great about backporting features to older kernels, I'm not sure they'll be able to move this
by technofiend 10y ago
This is the same problem shared by RedHat customers, although RH is great about backporting features to older kernels, I'm not sure they'll be able to move this to 3.x from 4.9. The price we pay for stability.
- 4ad 10y agoYou mean the price paid for stable kernel ABIs, so proprietary drivers can use them? The Linux kernel is the most safe operating system component to upgrade, mostly because the Linux kernel people care deeply about compatibility and not breaking user space. While it is still not free to upgrade, the cost is minimal compared to the cost (in real money, risk, security) of backporting major components to older kernels, like Red Hat is doing. Red Hat is maintaining old kernels for having a stable kernel ABI (among some other reasons), not for general "stability". Personally I run only CentOS, but always with a recent kernel, albeit usually a LTS one. Mostly to get exactly these type of features described in this article.
- technofiend 10y agoWell they show the same caution and care around curating their repositories and releasing security fixes, so in my opinion (you may disagree) they try to ensure stability beyond the kernel's ABI.
- jlgaddis 10y agoIndeed. The kernel is not the only component (of the complete system) that gets features backported. I, personally, am quite happy that I don't really have to worry that a routine "yum update" is going to break any of my installed applications.