Re: 5.10 LTS Kernel: 2 or 6 years?

[Hanjun Guo <guohanjun@huawei.com>]

On 2021/2/19 17:08, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 04:54:24PM +0800, Hanjun Guo wrote:
>> Hi Greg,
>>
>> On 2021/1/26 15:29, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>> [...]
>>>
>>> I want to see companies _using_ the kernel, and most importantly,
>>> _updating_ their devices with it, to know if it is worth to keep around
>>> for longer than 2 years.  I also, hopefully, want to see how those
>>> companies will help me out in the testing and maintenance of that kernel
>>> version in order to make supporting it for 6 years actually possible.
>>>
>>> So, are you planning on using 5.10?  Will you will be willing to help
>>> out in testing the -rc releases I make to let me know if there are any
>>> problems, and to help in pointing out and backporting any specific
>>> patches that your platforms need for that kernel release?
>>
>> We(Huawei) are willing to commit resources to help out in testing the
>> stable -rc releases, and to help to backport patches for stable kernels.
> 
> Wonderful!
> 
>> 5.10 stable kernel will be used for openEuler [1] kernel and also inside
>> Huawei. From customer's feedback, it's very important to see the stable
>> kernel we used to be maintained for 6 years in the community, and we
>> will use 5.10 kernel for at least 6 years, so we are willing to help
>> you and help ourselves :)
>>
>> In specific, we will start from the testing work, using HULK robot
>> (reports lots of bugs to mainline kernel) testing framework to test
>> compile, reboot, functional testing, and will extend to basic
>> performance regression testing in the future.
> 
> Great!  Do you all need an email notification when the -rc releases come
> out for the stable trees, or can you trigger off of the -rc stable git
> tree?  Different CI systems work in different ways :)

We can trigger the test when you updated the -rc stable git tree,
by monitoring new commits for the stable branches. So if you push
all the commits at once for -rc stable branches, then our CI system
can work well.

> 
> And if you can reply to the -rc release emails with a "Tested-by:" tag,
> I will be glad to add that to the release commit when that happens to
> show that you all have tested the release.

Thanks, will reply "Tested-by:" with -rc releases. We are working on
setting up the test farm and will report the test results in a week.

> 
>> And we will start from ARM64 and X86 architecture first, and then extend
>> to other platforms.
> 
> That's a good start, the useful ones :)
> 
>> For patch backporting, will send the bugfix patches (from mainline)
>> we spotted, but I think this work may not doing in regular but will
>> be triggered as needed.
> 
> That's fine, it is not something that happens at a regular interval.
> 
>> Does this sound good to you?
> 
> Yes it does, thank you so much.
> 
> greg k-h

Thanks
Hanjun