Re: 5.10 LTS Kernel: 2 or 6 years?

Willy Tarreau wrote:

The only set of fixes that can be trusted are the "official" stable
kernels, because they are the only ones that are approved by the patches
authors themselves. Adding more stuff on top of stable kernels is fine
(and done at your own risk), but randomly dropping stuff from stable
kernels just because you don't think you need that is totally non-sense
and must not be done anymore!

This may be little bit off-topic... but stable kernel.org kernels
can also bit-rot badly because of "selective" backporting... as in
anything that does not apply cleanly gets dropped regardless of
how critical they are.

I will give you one example: Intel WiFi (iwlwifi) on 4.19.y
kernel.org stable kernels is currently missing many critical
locking fixes. As a result, that in-tree iwlwifi driver causes
erratic behavior to random unrelated processes, and has been doing
so for many months now. My not-so-politically correct opinion is
that in-tree iwlwifi is completely FUBAR unless someone steps up
to do professional quality backport of those locking fixes from
upstream out-of-tree Intel version [1] [2] of the driver. For me
only way to get properly working WiFi on my laptop computer is to
compile that Intel out-of-tree version. Sad, but true.

[1] https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/iwlwifi/core_release
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/iwlwifi/backport-iwlwifi.git/

-- 
Jari Ruusu  4096R/8132F189 12D6 4C3A DCDA 0AA4 27BD  ACDF F073 3C80 8132 F189

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