sarge kernel frozen (2.4.27 and 2.6.8), and plans for post-sarge powerpc kernels.
Hello,
It seems as the 2.4.27 and 2.6.8 kernels which are sarge release candidates
are now frozen, and will be part of sarge as is, complete with all the bugs
and problems present in them, and maybe even some security issues which will
not be fixed in d-i, but only in testing/stable-security-updates, due to the
longish time needed for d-i to regenerate their kernel.
I thus announce my intentions to stop any work on those kernels, and give them
over to the sarge security team and/or any other group of people who will be
handling stable kernels, and focus my attention on the 2.6.11 and beyond
kernels.
I will shortly orphan those packages, but will not do an upload setting their
maintainers to q-a, as they should be maintained by the kernel-team anyway,
and i will not waste 24+ hours of build and bandwidth for such a small change.
2.4 series will be dropped post sarge, at least as far as powerpc is
concerned, so it would be nice to have someone with interest in the remaining
2.4-needing subarches to show up and propose patches for 2.6. These are :
o oldworld miboot refuses to work with 2.6 for some obscure reason, i got it
working three times in oldebourg, but it stopped working mysteriously, and
no positive report since then. well, miboot is non-free and currently
non-distributable anyway, so ... Maybe the quik-from-a-floppy work will help
us there.
o apus kernels. There is some 2.6 work, which i will apply as a subarch
patch to 2.6 kernels in the future, and build. I have no apus box at the
moment though (altough i am getting a A(3|)000, but needs a powerup card for
it still.
o nubus kernels. Those have been added to 2.4.27 kernels, but i have got no
report of their working or not. I heard there was willingness to work on 2.6
nubus kernels, and i would greatly appreciate getting patches for them, and
people with interest for testing.
All the other cases will work fine with 2.6 kernels, and there should be no
problem in dropping 2.4 for them. Anyone still running 2.4 kernels on powerpc
except for the three above cases needs to think it over seriously, given the
over one year now abandonement of upstream linuxppc developer of the 2.4
branch.
Plans on my part for 2.6 powerpc kernels are :
1) abandonement of the ppc32 power3 and power4 kernels in favour of ppc64
variants.
2) migration to a common and single kernel package for all arches.
3) forward porting of the above mentioned patches and inclusion in the main
2.6 kernels.
4) work on some way to move the serial console and other fbdev drivers to
modules which are loaded as early as possible from the ramdisk, to further
reduce the size of the kernel.
5) maybe start including some embedded kernels, depending on availability of
hardware and interest.
Anything else needed for the powerpc post-sarge kernels, please comment here.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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