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Linux 4.9 Will Be the Next LTS Kernel Branch, Says Greg Kroah-Hartman (softpedia.com)

Posted by msmash on from the Linux-marvel-heroes dept.

Reader prisoninmate writes: Renowned Linux kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said on Friday that the next LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel branch will be Linux 4.9. The development cycle of a new Linux kernel branch doesn't take more than a month and a half or a maximum of two months, depending if the respective series will receive seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) milestones, but LTS releases are picked by veteran kernel developers from time to time when older ones reach end of life (EOL). If Linux kernel 4.8 will be a normal release with a total of seven RCs and it'll be announced on day of September 25, then the development cycle of the Linux 4.9 kernel should start with the first Release Candidate development snapshot on October 9, 2016. But if Linux kernel 4.8 will have eight RCs, then we should see Linux kernel 4.9 LTS RC1 one week later, on October 16.

30 comments

  1. Poor summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    The summary is completely incoherent.

    1. Re:Poor summary by HBI · · Score: 0

      Seriously, such incoherence deserves a prison sentence.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  2. Re:So how long will the support be? by freakingme · · Score: 2

    It will be for a long term. You're welcome.

  3. No plan whatsoever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It seems like the kernel people have no plan whatsoever. Kernels are EOL'd when they feel like it and the next LTS version is picked arbitrarily (there is nothing especially stable about 4.9, in case you are wondering).

    Version numbers are mostly meaningless: Major versions change when Linus feels like it. Major breakage (as in, systems no longer booting) and major API changes happen even in minor versions. Version A.b isn't just an incremental update to A.a. It might bring an entirely new, experimental network stack, for example.

    Then there's the ABI instability. FreeBSD, for example, guarantees ABI stability between major versions. In Windows, a driver written for Windows 7 has a good chance of working in Windows 10. In Linux, you can't even get a compiled module to insert cleanly between two compiles of the same kernel with slightly different options.

    All of this makes it painful to develop for Linux, especially writing drivers. You either beg the kernel people to accept your driver in the tree (and hope that they maintain it), or you ship your driver in source form to users and fervently hope that your users manage to compile it (they won't).

    And before you say "But Nvidia...", not all of us have the resources to build a nice, clean driver install package. And this assumes that you can even reliably get the source/headers for your kernel in the first place, which, for example, in the case of the Raspberry Pi, isn't exactly easy.

    1. Re:No plan whatsoever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It seems like the kernel people have no plan whatsoever. Kernels are EOL'd when they feel like it and the next LTS version is picked arbitrarily (there is nothing especially stable about 4.9, in case you are wondering).

      Version numbers are mostly meaningless: Major versions change when Linus feels like it. Major breakage (as in, systems no longer booting) and major API changes happen even in minor versions. Version A.b isn't just an incremental update to A.a. It might bring an entirely new, experimental network stack, for example.

      Then there's the ABI instability. FreeBSD, for example, guarantees ABI stability between major versions. In Windows, a driver written for Windows 7 has a good chance of working in Windows 10. In Linux, you can't even get a compiled module to insert cleanly between two compiles of the same kernel with slightly different options.

      All of this makes it painful to develop for Linux, especially writing drivers. You either beg the kernel people to accept your driver in the tree (and hope that they maintain it), or you ship your driver in source form to users and fervently hope that your users manage to compile it (they won't).

      And before you say "But Nvidia...", not all of us have the resources to build a nice, clean driver install package. And this assumes that you can even reliably get the source/headers for your kernel in the first place, which, for example, in the case of the Raspberry Pi, isn't exactly easy.

      Will you cry some more, please? I want to use your tears to flavor my soup.

    2. Re:No plan whatsoever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you can't get the code you wrote accepted by the kernel developers, then I don't want it running on my system.

    3. Re:No plan whatsoever by gweihir · · Score: 1

      To anybody with a clue, that is not much of a problem. Kernel-upgrades for Linux (much unlike as those for a certain other OS) rarely cause significant problems.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    4. Re:No plan whatsoever by kroah · · Score: 5, Informative

      Version numbers do mean nothing, we have always said that as kernel developers.

      We don't break external APIs that people use, we break internal ones all the time, for good reasons. Read stable_api_nonsense.txt in the Linux kernel source tree for why we do this.

      And I will take _any_ kernel driver into the tree, just send it to me, we don't reject anything, much to many people annoyance...

      greg k-h

    5. Re:No plan whatsoever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fercrissakes someone mod this up.

    6. Re:No plan whatsoever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It seems like the kernel people have no plan whatsoever. Kernels are EOL'd when they feel like it and the next LTS version is picked arbitrarily (there is nothing especially stable about 4.9, in case you are wondering).

      Version numbers are mostly meaningless: Major versions change when Linus feels like it.

      I prefer the old days of Linux kernel development when point releases were rarer than hen with teeth. The third-level revisions were sufficient for years. Eventually, Linus adopted a marketing tactic whereby arbitrary "major" releases were announced. The fact of the matter is a modern linux kernel should be cross-compilable for older architectures previously supported but recently dropped. If the HURD kernel ever arrives and can use all the existing applications I currently enjoy on my computer, I will likely stop installed the linux kernel.

    7. Re:No plan whatsoever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As I sit here with a custom Linux 4.7 build running in a nested Linux/KVM instance in the background, reading /. for a few minutes as a short break before doing some coding, it occurs to me that many people don't say "thank you" enough these days. So, thank you for all your hard work over the years. It is deeply appreciated. -PCP

    8. Re:No plan whatsoever by trparky · · Score: 1

      But what do you do about the proprietary drivers that are often used by companies such as nVidia, ATi, Broadcom, and the various SoCs that are used in Android devices? Hell, I have a five year old router that's running TomatoUSB and it's still running kernel version 2.6.22.19 and there's no way to update the kernel without breaking the proprietary Broadcom SoC drivers that are needed for this router to work. Patches for security issues have to be back-ported to the 2.6.22 kernel and hope to God that the changes don't break the Broadcom drivers.

      I hate to say this but this is one of the reasons why older Android devices don't get updated as well. New versions of Android made by Google are released with newer Linux kernels but this of course results in SoC drivers ending up getting broken.

  4. Re:So how long will the support be? by rubycodez · · Score: 1

    usually when released there is promise of the time span, at least two years which is what this one has

    This is very different thing from an LTS distro by the way

  5. TFS is wrong by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

    The development cycle of a new Linux kernel branch doesn't take more than a month and a half or a maximum of two months, depending if the respective series will receive seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) milestones.

    No. One month merge window, ~2 months with weekly RCs. If the kernel releases early the merge window widens so they're on a very stable three month cycle. You'd think an post about the kernel would do a minimum of fact-checking, but no...

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  6. Re:So how long will the support be? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know, that's the kind of question people want answered.

    Do people really want to know that? Really? Do people really download and build their own kernels anymore? I guess some people do but most cerainly don't. Most people will use their distro kernel which the distro supports. This is something that the distro can do completely independent of whatever support the upstream kernel project provides.

  7. We want 5.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Stop procrasturbating and just skip to the next whole number.

    1. Re:We want 5.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why stop there? MacOS and Windows are on version 10.

    2. Re:We want 5.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why stop there? MacOS and Windows are on version 10.

      Mac has been on 10 almost as long as it was on 1 though 9 combined

    3. Re:We want 5.0 by number6x · · Score: 0

      Apple isn't really on 10, its on X as in NeXT. Apple gave up on MacOS when they hired back that Jobs guy.

    4. Re:We want 5.0 by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      Unix is provably better, because HP/UX and Solaris on version 11. Those slackers at IBM only have AIX up to 7 bet ever so that's *still* better than 4.x

  8. Re:So how long will the support be? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Do people really want to know that? Really? Do people really download and build their own kernels anymore?

    I do. I routinely build Linux From Scratch. I generally pick an LTS kernel to follow and this news is very useful (I'm currently on version 4.4, another LTS release). Folks that do this are not the majority, or even a significant minority, but there are people out there that care.

    Also, since the Linux kernel does not guarantee ABI compatibility, an LTS kernel allows you prepare for the future. If you're writing kernel modules (which a greater number of people do), it is trivial to target specific LTS releases versus every possible release of the kernel ever.

  9. Renowned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Has someone hired himself a publicist? Is he being groomed or fluffed?

  10. Re:PC Police!! Pull over!! by Masked+Coward · · Score: 2

    I'm just not sure which is his wife's boyfriend's last name.... Kroah, or Hartman?

  11. Re: PC Police!! Pull over!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So you've never heard of Tim Berners-Lee, then?

  12. Re:So how long will the support be? by gexacor · · Score: 1

    I'm not used to think about Linux 3.x kernel as a stable yet! And when I think that I'm out - they pull me back again!!! ©