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At Sat, 11 Jul 2015 15:48:09 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
Dear openSUSE Kernel Maintainers,
I assume most of you have been following the mailinglist regarding the discussions about openSUSE Regular Releases, but to very briefly summarise:
- openSUSE 13.2 looks likely to be the last of the 'Factory-snapshot-based' Regular Releases (There is still a possibility volunteers will step up, but the previous team involved in those releases are not continuing them) - openSUSE will be producing a new Regular Release called 'Leap' - 'Leap' will consist of a combination of both openSUSE community packages and packages based on SLE sources - The first version of Leap will be 'Leap 42.1' which we're hoping to release at SUSEcon in November - 'Leap' releases will be aligned with SLE releases, with a 'minor release' around the time of each SLE Service Pack, and a 'major release' before a new SLE Version. - Maintenance of the 'Leap' releases are likely to be similarly aligned - I expect maintenance of each minor release to overlap only for 6 months like with SLE. Maintenance of the last-Leap-minor-release before a Major release is likely to be extended until the first-Leap-minor-release of the new version (eg. Assuming 42.3 is the version that comes out before 43.0, 42.3 should receive maintenance updates until 43.1 is out) - As a general rule of thumb, the expectation is that the SLE sources will provide the 'base' of the operating system, with community packages built ontop
And this is where I come to you. Feedback from both our existing contributing community and random people on the internet has been overall pretty supportive of the idea, however there's one recurring sticking point
The SLE Kernel, it's age, and potential lack of hardware support
While me and others have fought hard explaining that SUSE do a lot of work adding hardware enablement in the SLE Kernel, and the version number is not a good reflection of it's capabilities, this hasn't sent those concerns away
I've also spoken to Takashi, who gave me some pretty good solid examples of specific scenarios where the SLE Kernel is missing stuff's likely to be very important to openSUSE users (Hardware support for Laptops newer than 2 years for example)
So together we've come up with the suggestion that Leap 42.1 could include the Linux 4.1 Kernel
I understand it's expected 4.1 will be an LTS Kernel, which is perfect for our desire for Leap to be seen as the more-stable alternative to Tumbleweed.
I do not think we should set too much in stone right now, especially as much of Leap is still at the 'putting together' stage, but I do know that SUSE are considering a Kernel upgrade for SLE 12 SP2, so my current line of thinking would be that having Kernel 4.1 in Leap 42.1 might end up being a 'stop-gap' before Leap takes whatever new kernel ends up in SLE 12 SP2.
Even if SUSE do not change their kernel in SLE 12 SP2, if 4.1 is going to be an LTS release, it might make sense for us to keep using it even for Leap 42.2, which is another reason choosing Kernel 4.1 now seems like a good idea to me.
I don't want to declare policy on you guys, but I think a guideline of "Favouring LTS Kernels and using the SLE kernel if it makes sense" is probably a good starting point for a policy for "which Kernel should Leap have?"
So I guess I can boil down this long post to a few questions
1. Do you like the idea of Kernel 4.1 in Leap 42.1? 2. If yes, are you/is one of you willing to maintain Kernel 4.1 as the kernel for Leap 42.1? 3. Do you like the idea of favouring LTS Kernels and/or SLE Kernels for future Leap releases?
As a person who proposed such an idea, I'm willing to take the role of this git branch maintainer (openSUSE-Leap-4.1 or whatever) once when we agree with this direction. And I already started some conversation with SUSE kernel teams about the group maintenance of 4.1 kernel, so this shouldn't be a big burden. thanks, Takashi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org