preparations for 4.16.4 and 4.17.1

preparations for 4.16.4 and 4.17.1

[Jan Beulich]

All,

the former release is due in a couple of weeks time, the latter a week
or two later. Note that with us following the 4 month cadence pretty
strictly this time, 4.16.4 isn't expected to be the last ordinary stable
release from the 4.16 branch, yet (unless, of course, we end up slipping
significantly).

Please point out backports you find missing from the respective staging
branch, but which you consider relevant. I have one change queued on top
of what I've pushed to the branches earlier today, simply because it
hasn't passed the push gate on master yet:

0d2686f6b66b AMD/IOMMU: without XT, x2APIC needs to be forced into physical mode

Jan

Re: preparations for 4.16.4 and 4.17.1

[Andrew Cooper]

On 21/03/2023 2:30 pm, Jan Beulich wrote:
> All,
>
> the former release is due in a couple of weeks time, the latter a week
> or two later. Note that with us following the 4 month cadence pretty
> strictly this time, 4.16.4 isn't expected to be the last ordinary stable
> release from the 4.16 branch, yet (unless, of course, we end up slipping
> significantly).
>
> Please point out backports you find missing from the respective staging
> branch, but which you consider relevant. I have one change queued on top
> of what I've pushed to the branches earlier today, simply because it
> hasn't passed the push gate on master yet:
>
> 0d2686f6b66b AMD/IOMMU: without XT, x2APIC needs to be forced into physical mode

All subsequent to this email, but for completeness:

6d14cb105b x86/shadow: Fix build with no PG_log_dirty (all trees, as
this was a bug in XSA-427)

bc3c133841 x86/nospec: Fix evaluate_nospec() code generation under Clang

~Andrew

Re: preparations for 4.16.4 and 4.17.1

[Jan Beulich]

On 27.03.2023 12:55, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 21/03/2023 2:30 pm, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> the former release is due in a couple of weeks time, the latter a week
>> or two later. Note that with us following the 4 month cadence pretty
>> strictly this time, 4.16.4 isn't expected to be the last ordinary stable
>> release from the 4.16 branch, yet (unless, of course, we end up slipping
>> significantly).
>>
>> Please point out backports you find missing from the respective staging
>> branch, but which you consider relevant. I have one change queued on top
>> of what I've pushed to the branches earlier today, simply because it
>> hasn't passed the push gate on master yet:
>>
>> 0d2686f6b66b AMD/IOMMU: without XT, x2APIC needs to be forced into physical mode
> 
> All subsequent to this email, but for completeness:
> 
> 6d14cb105b x86/shadow: Fix build with no PG_log_dirty (all trees, as
> this was a bug in XSA-427)
> 
> bc3c133841 x86/nospec: Fix evaluate_nospec() code generation under Clang

I've queued both already, yes, but for the first one you name I'm not
really intending to put it into 4.15 and 4.14 - this is the kind of
issue where older trees simply won't have fixed anymore. The problem
only affects an obscure configuration, which is hardly used anywhere
for real. Or are you suggesting that CI runs randconfig tests also
against branches which are in security-only mode? (If it does, then
I'm not sure this isn't a mistake, because issues not introduced by
security fixes wouldn't be fixed there anymore either.)

Jan