Re: 5.10 LTS Kernel: 2 or 6 years?

[Sasha Levin]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 11:48:21AM -0800, Scott Branden wrote:
> On 2021-02-17 1:40 a.m., Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > Following up on this as I did not hear back from you.  Are you and/or
> > your company willing to help out with the testing of 5.10 to ensure that
> > it is a LTS kernel?  So far I have not had any companies agree to help
> > out with this effort, which is sad to see as it seems that companies
> > want 6 years of stable kernels, yet do not seem to be able to at the
> > least, do a test-build/run of those kernels, which is quite odd...
> I personally cannot commit to supporting this kernel for 6 years
> (and personally do not want to backport new features to a 6 year old kernel).
> And customers are finicky and ask for one thing and then change their mind later.

Why would we commit to maintining an upstream LTS for 6 years then? If
no one ends up using it (and we don't want anyone using older LTS
kernels) we're still stuck maintaining it.

> We'll have to see what decisions are made at a company level for this as there
> are added costs to run tests on LTS kernel branches.  We already run extensive QA on

This sounds very wrong: it's ok to get volunteers to commit to 6 years
while the company that is asking for it won't do the same?

Shouldn't Broadcom commit to the work involved here first?

> whatever active development branches are in use and a subset on the mainline
> branch as well.  QA resources are finite and committing those for 6 years is
> not something that makes sense if customers drop that kernel version.
> Testing of the LTS kernel changes really moves out of our hands and into the
> customer's testing after our major releases to them.

Keep in mind that QA resources are generally more abundant than
engineering resources that need to actually backport stuff to old
kernels.

--
Thanks,
Sasha