Andi Kleen's blog

Tilting at windmills and other endeavors

Linux kernel 2.6.35 longterm maintenance

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After Greg Kroah-Hartmann stopped maintaining 2.6.35-stable. I plan to maintain the 2.6.35 linux kernel tree longterm for now. Thanks to Greg for all his hard work on this.

The primary consumers of 2.6.35 right now are Meego and the CE Linux Forum, but some others are interested and everyone who wants a long term stable tree is of course free to use it.

The longterm tree continues after Greg’s 2.6.35.9 stable release. It will not be called “stable”, but called “longterm” to make the distinction clear.

longterm has no defined end date (but also no guarantee that it will be around forever) and will be maintained longer than normal stable kernels. The existing 2.6.32 stable kernel mainteind by Greg will be also named “longterm” now. There is also a 2.6.34 longterm kernel maintained by Paul Gortmaker.

The longterm kernels will move into new directories on kernel.org. The 2.6.35 releases will be available at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/longterm/v2.6.35/. The other longterm kernels (.32 and .34) will get similar directories. The git tree for the release is available in git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/longterm/linux-2.6.35.y.git

The 2.6.35 longterm tree follows the stable rules in Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt

My plan is to look at all patches that go into later stables (that is which are sent to stable@kernel.org or marked Cc: stable@kernel.org in the git description) and merge them into 2.6.35 when applicable. I don’t expect there will be many
patches only for 2.6.35 and not for later stable trees. If there are and they are submitted to stable@kernel.org I will consider them. I plan to be fairly conservative.

I will follow a similar flow as Greg: There will be candidate trees which are posted to Linux kernel and have a 48h review period, with patches being dropped then as needed. Then the candidates will turn into releases, if noone objects to the patches.

The current candidate is 2.6.35.10-rc1. This will soon turn into 2.6.35.10.

The patches before a release are maintained in a quilt queue, which is available in a git repository at kernel.org. After that they migrate to the 2.6.35.y git tree.

Written by therapsid

December 14th, 2010 at 12:21 pm

Posted in kernel