Re: Kernel 2.4 for etch or not
Holger Levsen wrote:
> * This is a blog entry I wanted to write for about six weeks now, but I=20
> was busy with other stuff. In December 2005 I got curious why 2.4.32
> wasn't packaged for Debian and investigated the situation a bit.
>
> There are several reasons why 2.4 is still interesting:
>
> - Kernel 2.6 is still a moving target...
But that isn't really relevant for a single version that's going to be stabilised
for a stable release, it's only an issue for people upgrading to every new 2.6
release (and even than the changes are a lot less dramatic than often claimed).
> - Some hardware is only supported with 2.4, for example older laptops
> which need APM and don't work with ACPI. Also some non-i386 machines.
I don't know about non-i386, but for i386 the amount of hardware only supported
for 2.6 should be negligable. SuSE and Red Hat ship their consumer distros with
2.6 exclusively since about two years now. (And nowadays even their enterprise
products). And 2.6 still has APM support, BTW.
> - According to popcon, 6-7% of the i386 users have a kernel-2.4 image
> installed.
According to ajt ~ 6% of all users still download Woody'y apt/sources.list from
the FTP servers, so many of these might still be Woody users and nowadays
you'll hardly find new hardware that is fully supported by 2.4.27.
> Even though 2.4 is moving very slowly nowadays (mostly security updates,
> very seldom new drivers are including), this is more work than needed,
> because every fix needs to be backported to 2.4.27 (and 2.4.18 for woody).
According to a linux-kernel posting by Marcelo Tosatti a few weeks ago 2.4
is now in strict maintenance mode, with only critical bug fixes being allowed.
As of today several of the security fixes for 2.4 are already pushed upstream
by Dann or Horms, it's unreasonable to do so until 2010, when Sarge's oldstable
support will fade out.
I really think we should drop 2.4 rather soon that late.
Cheers,
Moritz
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