Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (648 mails)

[Stephen Shaw <sshaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 09:09, Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> Hi all -
>
> Since technically we're in feature freeze for 11.4, I thought I'd put
> this out for discussion.
>
> Factory is currently using 2.6.36 which was released 3 weeks ago.
> Upstream versions tend to take about 10-11 weeks, on average, to
> release. The scheduled release for the first openSUSE RC is Jan 20.
>
> The scheduled release for the first RC is Jan 20. The typical
> development time for a kernel release, on average, is about 10-11 weeks.
> That puts the release of 2.6.37 around Dec 29 to Jan 12.
>
> That sounds like kind of a tight window, but the reality is that the
> differences in the later kernel RCs tend to be small and fix bugs. The
> "real" development happens in -rc1, which was released about two weeks
> ago. Later -rcs serve to stabilize the development that went into -rc1.
> So, the the feature freeze aspect of it will be a one-shot, when I
> update to -rc1. (Actually, I hardly ever update to -rc1 and instead use
> - -rc2 which tends to be more stable).
>
> I've already done the merge work for 2.6.37-rc1 since the master kernel
> always tracks the latest upstream. Xen is the lone exception, as it
> usually is, but Jan Beulich has been great about getting that completed
> shortly after I do the update. This time might be a little more
> difficult because much of the Xen code has been merged into the mainline
> kernel so there's some sorting out to be done.
>
> As far as testing goes, we're still early enough that we won't lose a
> lot of effort. I'd update Factory to 2.6.37-rc2 as soon as it is
> released upstream, which should be this week. Our usual corps of
> dedicated testers can dig in quickly. In my experience, though, the
> number of testers drastically increases around the RC1 release. I wish
> it weren't so, but it is. So revving the kernel now isn't likely to toss
> out a lot of testing.
>
> The biggest "feature" I'm going for is not having to backport fixes from
> 2.6.37. The BKL removal patches and the VFS scalability patches are
> going to improve performance on multicore systems. The removal of I/O
> barriers should also be pretty noticeable but I haven't had time to
> verify that yet.
>
> So, opinions?
>
> - -Jeff

Another thing to take into consideration is what the other
distributions are going to include.  My guess is that they will be
using 2.6.37 which if that's the case will see more testing than
2.6.36.

Stephen
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