The ToF was talking about linux versions being used for OpenBMC users and we were wondering if we could codify a policy around which versions we will be developing against regularly. In the past it seems like you usually pick LTS releases to base on (and Facebook / Google are interested in sticking with LTS releases in order to reduce toil / number of potentially incompatible kernel upgrades for each of our machines). It would seem like kernel 6.0 should be an LTS release, although gregkh hasn't said anything specifically about it yet. Can we get something written about the expected alignment with upstream kernel release cadence?
Hello OpenBMC,
We've been using the v5.15 kernel as a base for almost 11 months. In
that time there's been 16 bumps to pull in stable fixes. We have
merged about 300 patches in that time to support new machines, and new
hardware, including MCTP, nct6775, lm25066, aspeed-adc and aspeed's
spi-nor devices.
It's time to move to a new base to ensure progress is made on our
mission to upstream all of the support. By rebasing on a new kernel
release we can see what work has been done, and what remains. Since
v5.15 we have upstream support for:
- PECI, thanks to Jae and Iwona
- MCTP, thanks to Jermey and Matt
- spi-nor, thanks to Cédric
- nct6775 i2c and lm25066, thanks to Zev
- ast2600 adc, thanks to Billy
- ast2600 gfx, thanks to Tommy
and others I have missed.
In addition to the ASPEED changes the Nuvton hackers have been hard at
work. We now have support for their latest generation Cortex-A35 BMC,
the npcm845 "Arbel" and it's eval board. Likewise the HPE "GXP"
Cortex-A9 ASIC now has upstream support. Congratulations to both teams
for this work.
I have prepared a v6.0 tree that contains backports of the FSI and
Aspeed v6.1 patches, and a small set of existing patches. I will
publish this on Monday, or once v6.0 final has been tagged.
As promised the last time we rebased, the Nuvoton patches that have
not seen any updates since they were merged in 2019 have been dropped.
They are welcome to be resubmitted as long as they are also being
worked on upstream.
Please address any future patches to the dev-6.0 tree.
Cheers,
Joel