Re: 2.4 & 2.6 kernels, should sarge be 2.6 only at least for powerpc ?
Hello,
Well, nobody seemed to care or comment on this, so let's take this to a
wider audience.
Christoph has recently told me that he doesn't care about 2.4, and even
benh has mentioned to me that 2.4 support for powerpc will be going away
in the near term (well, not the eact words, but you get my meaning). And
i guess that Jens also is only interested on 2.6 kernels, even though he
is comaintainer of the 2.4 kernels too.
So, i am seriously considering dropping all 2.4 powerpc kernels, and
going with 2.6 only, and would like to get feedback both from
debian-kernel as well as debian-powerpc, feedback i didn't get in the
past.
Ah, and i am seriously considering dropping support for apus from the
kernels (and thus debian-installer). I believe that they are only a
handfull of apus users left, and those are happily running self built
2.2 kernels. Furthermore, i have some evidence that not only where the
debian apus kernels never tried on apus, but also that there is big
chance they don't even work. I don't have apus hardware anymore, so ...
So, please feedback is welcome.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 09:55:46PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 05:29:38PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > There's a few reports against 2.4 kernel that are fixed in 2.6 and are
> > unlikely to get in 2.4 every (Examples: #146956 or #130217). How should
> > we deal with them in the BTS?
>
> The real question here is to ask ourselves what is our option for the
> sarge release. Will we release with 2.4 as default, which is the track
> we are on right now, or will we release with 2.6 as default, and keep
> 2.4 about only as backup in case there is a real problem with 2.4.
>
> There are both advantages and problems in going with 2.6 :
>
> advantage: it is the future, has some features and fixes which will
> not be backported to 2.4, and moreover many of our new kernel team
> have no interest whatsoever for 2.4, which includes benh and Christoph
> among others.
>
> problems: not all architectures support 2.6 yet (well, most of them do
> not), and moreover, our userland has probably not been fully tested
> with 2.6 all that much.
>
> So, the real question, for those arches which do support 2.6, and if
> those bug reports you mention are problems only on those arches where
> 2.6 is supported, and if we decide to go for 2.6, then it should be ok
> to mark those bugs as wontfix, and put a note that it is fixed in 2.6.
>
> If on the other hand we decide to go with 2.4 by default, or those bugs
> affect arches which are not ready to go with 2.6, then not only it is
> not ok to close them (even if our new kernel team doesn't care for 2.4),
> but we should either backport the fix, or find another way to close it
> before the sarge release.
>
> Now, about going with 2.6, i personnally would maybe like to go with 2.6
> eclusively for all the powerpc subarches, altough i am not entirely sure
> we are ready for this. For this to happen we need to achieve the
> following :
>
> Have a kernel bootable on all subarches :
>
> -> yaboot using newworld pmac & chrp-rs6k : Ok, but need testing on
> chrp-rs6k
> -> mkvmlinuz generated chrp : Need to find a solution for the
> generation of the vmlinuz image, should be easy, once we agree on a
> way to go.
> -> oldworld pmac : We need to shrink the size of the kernel so it
> fits on a miboot floppy and test it. This should be best achieved by
> modularizing the pmac-ide driver, and other pmac stuff which could
> be modularized. Benh said he scarcely has time for it, and Christoph
> promised he would have a look.
> -> prep : renamed pplus in the kernel code. We need to add mkvmlinuz
> code for this one, not sure about the others, we did not support
> them, but it should be possible to add support to mkvmlinuz easily
> enough. Testing on those subarches is needed though.
> -> apus : Well, a 2.6 port could be done and tested, using a
> conditionally applied patch or something such, or merging the
> patches. That said, since there are at most 5-10 users left, and
> those are using their own kernels, maybe we should drop kernel
> support for them.
>
> Another point would be to test the 2.6 debian-installer on all those
> subarches, and fi the problems if they appear.
>
> If all this does happen before the sarge release, and if the userland
> issues are solved, then i would strongly recomend going for 2.6 for
> powerpc at least, especially as the members of the debian kernel team
> with interest in powerpc care very little about 2.4 kernels.
>
> Friendly,
>
> Sven Luther
> >
> >
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