Re: XFS problem in 2.6.32

From: david
Date: Tue Jun 07 2011 - 15:45:29 EST


On Tue, 7 Jun 2011, Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG wrote:

Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:49:36 +0200
So who keeps track on which patches needs to get backported or not? And who will backport XFS fixes back to 2.6.32?

An interested kernel developer. They can become interested because they personally have the time or interest, or because someone pays them to become interested. Support of the stable kernel series is not something that happens magically, or which is funded by a charity, you know. That's why some companies pay $$$ for a supported distribution kernel.

OK so my thought was totally wrong. I thought the longterm stable releases will still get bugfixed by SGI or whoever wrote the stuff. Sorry for that then. But what is then the idea of a longterm stable?

development and bugfixes are done on the latest kernel, if the problem is known to affect old kernels the developers sometimes remember to notify the -stable list that this patch is important and needs to be applied to older kernels.

whoever the maintainer of the -stable/-longterm tree is (be it an individual or a team employeed by some comapny) then looks at the patch and considers backporting it (if it's too hard, or to intrusive, they may decide not to).

the idea of the lonterm kernels is that organizations need to maintain a kernel for a long time due to commitments that they have made (Debian doesn't want to change the kernel it ships in a stable version, RedHat doesn't want to change the kernel version in a RHEL release, etc), and so they publicly announce this so that anyone else wanting to use the same kernel version can share in the work (and therefor everyone can benifit from each other's work)

David Lang
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/