[MODERATED] Re: eager FPU backport for 2.6.32

[Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.com>]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2018, speck for Paolo Bonzini wrote:

> >> Please, why are we doing this crazy thing?
> > RHEL6 extended support contract I suspect... but yes, that's marketing
> > speak for what you said :-)
> 
> Yeah it's crazy but it helps paying my meals and quite likely at least
> Oracle and SuSE care too.  

Absolutely. We have 3.0 backport of eager FPU stuff ready, but as 2.6.32 
patches are super-set of it, it's probably pointless to send it here at 
this point.

> It's not even a particularly hard backport, just boring.  PTI was 
> backported to 2.6.18 even, that was more interesting.

There are people on this list who even did 2.6.16 PTI port :)

On Mon, 11 Jun 2018, speck for Paolo Bonzini wrote:

> > Does the support contract really say "no package version changes"?

> No, but there are some (not full of course) guarantees about drivers ABI 
> (not just API), and given stable-api-nonsense.txt there aren't many ways 
> to do it.  Not that I disagree with stable-api-nonsense.txt, of course.

Also, each and every time we start talking about changing major kernel 
version (or any other reasonably core package), we get pushback along the 
lines of "that would invalidate all the certifications we have, and it'd 
cost us a fortune to recertify everything with 3rd parties and such".

No matter how crazy and irelevant on technical level that sounds, welcome 
to the enterprise universe :/

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs