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Can you give me an example of some hardware that is in general use that is no longer supported in Kernel 3.18/3.19? (I'm not saying you can't - I'm genuinely in

• kbenson 12y ago
  It's not that it's not supported, it's that the driver may have been modified to support other devices, or a portion could have been rewritten, and that could lead to short-term instability until they identify and fix any problems introduced.
• pgaddict 12y ago
  It's not just about removing support for hardware - that happens from time to time, but generally not with reasonably recent hardware. It's also about minimizing risk of bugs in the new parts - even if you do a very thorough testing, you can't really eliminate the risks, so the more conservative deployments simply keep the old kernel versions. I do have my own experience with this, particularly with 3.10 - we've thoroughly evaluated it, yet after a few days on production all the machines crashed because of deadlock in the I/O stack. Very time consuming to debug where the actual problem is (virtualised environment, ...). So while I run Gentoo on most of my personal machines, I do understand why people are conservative.