Question for AMD patches

Question for AMD patches

[Young Hsieh]

Hello, 

This is Young Hsieh from Uber and currently I am in Uber infra team and in charge of server system design. Nice to e-meet you!  :)

We are working on AMD Milan platform with Debian, and notice there are some patches for performance and security improvements, which are not implemented in LTS kernels (4.14/4.19/5.4) yet. On our side, we prefer to use the general LTS kernel release instead of a customized kernel, in case we will not align on major fixes down the road. So would like to know if there is any plan to backport these patches and if so, what is the timeline?  Thanks a lot again for any advice.  

Cheers,
****************************************
Young Hsieh
Uber Hardware Engineer
****************************************

Re: Question for AMD patches

[Sasha Levin]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 04:05:45AM +0800, Young Hsieh wrote:
>Hello,
>
>This is Young Hsieh from Uber and currently I am in Uber infra team and in charge of server system design. Nice to e-meet you!  :)
>
>We are working on AMD Milan platform with Debian, and notice there are some patches for performance and security improvements, which are not implemented in LTS kernels (4.14/4.19/5.4) yet. On our side, we prefer to use the general LTS kernel release instead of a customized kernel, in case we will not align on major fixes down the road. So would like to know if there is any plan to backport these patches and if so, what is the timeline?  Thanks a lot again for any advice.

Easy: use 5.10. It's LTS and has all the patches you care about.

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha

Re: Question for AMD patches

[Greg K-H]

What exact commits are you referring to?

And you do know about the rules for stable kernel patches, right?

greg k-h

On December 17, 2020 9:05:45 PM GMT+01:00, Young Hsieh <youngh@uber.com> wrote:
>Hello, 
>
>This is Young Hsieh from Uber and currently I am in Uber infra team and in charge of server system design. Nice to e-meet you!  :)
>
>We are working on AMD Milan platform with Debian, and notice there are some patches for performance and security improvements, which are not implemented in LTS kernels (4.14/4.19/5.4) yet. On our side, we prefer to use the general LTS kernel release instead of a customized kernel, in case we will not align on major fixes down the road. So would like to know if there is any plan to backport these patches and if so, what is the timeline?  Thanks a lot again for any advice.  
>
>Cheers,
>****************************************
>Young Hsieh
>Uber Hardware Engineer
>****************************************

Re: Question for AMD patches

[Sasha Levin]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 07:34:07AM +0800, Young Hsieh wrote:
>Hi Sasha,
>
>The other reason we are wondering if 5.4 has backporting is we are not very comfortable about using the bleeding edge. Do you think 5.10 is stable currently?  Thanks for your help again. :)

Hi Young,

See https://www.kernel.org/releases.html for a list of the LTS branches.

The 5.10 kernel is already designated as LTS and should be used by most
stable tree users; this is the preferrable kernel to adopt right now.

The AMD hardware enablement stuff won't be backported on top of 5.4.

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha

Re: Question for AMD patches

[Greg K-H]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 05:18:16AM +0800, Young Hsieh wrote:
> Hi Greg,
> 
> Thanks.  I am looking for the Essential, RAS & Perf patches for AMD Milan as follows:
> 

I don't see anything here :(


> I am not familiar the rules for stable kernel patches, can you help to elaborate ?  Thanks for your assistance! :) 

Please read:
    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-kernel-rules.html

for what stable kernels are all about.

thanks,

greg k-h