On Thu, Dec 03, 2020 at 11:09:26PM +0100, Vinzenz Vietzke wrote:
We (TUXEDO Computers) are selling laptops and PCs with openSUSE Leap preinstalled. One problem we run into quite often is the relatively old kernel version of Leap. E.g. for our lines of AMD Renoir laptops we would need at least 5.6.x upwards to get everything running.
Are you sure neither 15.2 nor upcoming 15.3 kernel support your hardware? We have a lot of hardware enablement in these, both for CPU and GPU.
In the past we "fixed" that by manually adding kernels from Kernel:stable which neither is a clean solution nor convenient for technically unexperienced users like many of our customers.
Ubuntu has their so called "Hardware Enablement" updates via point releases which delivers newer Kernels, Mesa etc. In addition to that they maintain an so called OEM Kernel, which currently is at 5.6.x. Both things are really helpful for our purposes.
So my question is: Is there something similar available for openSUSE? Maybe an intermedia kernel for Leap?
Similar suggestion came up few times in the past, usually before release of a new Leap version, more so for the odd versions where there is no base kernel version upgrade. The problem is always the same: while there are people who would be interested in running such kernel on their systems, noone is willing to prepare and, more important, maintain it. And that is really the problem. The old model where openSUSE kernel was independent of SLE didn't work well because the was visible lack of effort on backporting fixes into it. Few years ago I collected some numbers illustrating how important sharing fixes between SLE and openSUSE kernel branches is: https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2016-05/msg00398.html I believe it's safe to assume that even if someone volunteers to maintain a separate branch with newer base version for 15.3, the result wouldn't work better than the old model we employed up to openSUSE 13.2. But so far it's rather academic question. Michal Kubecek