Challenges Around Long-Term Kernel Maintenance
Talkat LinuxCon @ Open Source Summit Japan 2023 · on Tuesday, 2023-12-05· at 11:15· Conference Room 1 (3F Level), Ariake Central Tower Hall + Conference, 3-7-18, Ariake, Koto-ku·
summary
Maintaining long‑term stable kernels becomes exponentially harder as trees diverge: the project sees about 10,000 commits per release cycle, simple cherry‑picks turn into hundreds of conflicts on 4–6 year old trees, and recent upstream changes like folios and block‑layer refactors create permanent incompatibilities that block fixes. Recommended remedies are concrete: include dependent patches when backporting, improve real‑world testing (CI, zero‑touch bots, bisection), report regressions to the regression mailing list/trackers, run a small percent of production workloads on the latest LTS, and prefer supporting fewer, more current kernels.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:24Why are you doing LTS
- 3:28Why is it hard
- 4:57Is there easy conflicts
- 9:05Users
- 13:27Community
- 15:13Testing
- 22:53Upgrade Often
- 26:51Developing the Ability to Do By Sections
- 30:51Vendor Carels
- 33:26GPU Breaks
related talks
41mThe Kernel Report
34mAn SRE Guide to Linux Kernel Upgrades
25mLinux: Where Are We Going
39mUsing Long Term Stable Kernel for the Embedded Products
17mSustaining Yesterday’s Linux: Delivering Security for Today’s Workloads
27mAn SRE guide to Linux Kernel upgrades
34mHow to Decide the Linux Kernel Version
39mThe Life of a Kernel Bugfix