Am Monday 15 November 2010 17:09:43 schrieb Jeff Mahoney:
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.
Thank you for providing new 2.6.37-rc2. I need this kernel for my TV-usb-Card. I have installed it from kernel:head on my OS11.3 laptop. But the system does not start with the 2.6.37 series. I have also testet 2.6.37-rc1 vanilla. On my desktop machine ( with 11.2) it works perfekt. Shall I open a bug-report? But I have no idea what to report. After Grub there comes nothing. What can I try further? Daniel