linux-kernel - Re: Linux 3.10.108 (EOL)

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Message-ID: <20171115043202.GA4315@1wt.eu>
Date:   Wed, 15 Nov 2017 05:32:02 +0100
From:   Willy Tarreau <w@....eu>
To:     Sebastian Gottschall <s.gottschall@...wrt.com>
Cc:     Harsh Shandilya <msfjarvis@...il.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, stable@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux 3.10.108 (EOL)

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 11:40:31PM +0100, Sebastian Gottschall wrote:
> > And anyway the end of life has been indicated on kernel.org for 18 months
> > and in every announce in 2017, so it cannot be a surprize anymore :-) At
> > least nobody seemed to complain for all this time!
> 
> itsn no surprise for sure, but that also means i have to stay on the old
> kernel for these special devices and your argument about disable certain
> parts which simply turned bigger over time is no option
> 
> since it would remove features which existed before. its not that i enable
> all features of the kernel. i use every kernel with the same options (some
> are adjusted since they are renamed or moved)

Then I have a few questions :
  - how did you choose this kernel ? Or did you choose the hardware based
    on the kernel size ?
  - what would have you done if 3.10 had not been LTS ?
  - have you at least tried other kernels before claiming they are much
    larger ? Following your principle, 3.2 should be smaller and 3.16 not
    much larger. The former offers you about 6 extra months of maintenance,
    the latter 3.5 years (https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html).

> but even then the kernel is turning into a ram and space eating monster if i
> look on devices with 16 mb ram and 4 mb flash. this is mainly for
> maintaining older hardware with latest updates.

So why didn't you ask if it was possible to pursue the maintenance a bit a
long time ago ? LTS maintenance is a collective effort and is done based on
usage. If enough people have good reasons for going further it can be enough
a justification to push the deadline. Now it's too late.

> the more recent hardware is getting better here
> 
> you dont seem to know how it is to work on wireless routers :-)

Yes I do, I've been distributing a full blown load balancer distro on a
10 MB image (running on 3.10 as well). But I also know that sometimes
you make some nice space savings on new kernels (xz/zstd compression,
ability to remove certain useless stuff in these environments such as
FS ACLs or mandatory locks, etc). Sure, upgrading to a new kernel on
existing hardware is always a challenge. But it's also an interesting
one.

Also just to give you an idea, I've just compared the size of these
kernels configured with "make allnoconfig" (and I verified that all
of them were compressed using gzip) :

  3.10.108 : 875 kB
  4.4.97   : 522 kB
  4.9.61   : 561 kB
  4.14     : 566 kB

So the argument that migrating away from 3.10 is hard due to the size
doesn't stand much here :-)

Willy