Gentoo sources in stable branch

[Marcih]

Us boring and non-adventurous folk who still haven't moved our entire systems to testing branch have been stuck on the 4.9 kernel tree since December last year. Are there any news on continuing moving along with the upstream Linux releases? What was wrong with the 4.12 and 4.14 versions? What's happening with the frantic kernel releases over at kernel.org? Didn't it use to be like an update semi-annually?

[asturm]

Use 4.14 if you want to, the stable badge does not have any meaning for kernel sources except 'bugs will get preferential treatment'. Use whatever kernel is required for your hardware, or your needs, as long as it is kept up to date. 4.12 is dead for a long time already, 4.14 is the current LTS line and surely will be 'stabilised' at some point.

[Marcih]

[asturm]

For upstream, each release is a stable release. LTS means 4.14 will not stop at 4.14.12-something (it is in fact at 4.14.22 already) but will get security and bugfixes for a number of n years and climb up as high 4.14.100 or more.

There is no such thing as a guarantee and I have had issues with kernel versions as high as ~3.4.75 or ~3.4.100 because mistakes happen, but no stabilising process by Gentoo would have ever caught that, simply because it is impossible to test for all hardware out there, and all we can do is declare 'has probably been run without major bugs for a long enough time'.

[Hu]

To elaborate on asturm's explanation, kernels that are not declared LTS tend to be abandoned by GregKH shortly after he starts maintaining the next higher stable series. "Short" sometimes provides overlap of one or a few releases, but you usually won't see him maintaining 4.x.y after 4.(x+1).y has had several releases. In some cases, someone else steps up to maintain it afterward, but usually no one does. Contrast that with LTS which, as asturm says, gets years of backports and a fairly high number of releases before it is retired.

[charles17]

[benchaney]

Is there a straight forward way to setup portage to always install the latest bugfix release on a given minor branch?

[asturm]

Same as you would do with any other ebuild.

=sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.14*

[toralf]

[Hu]

If you don't use any packages that demand configured kernel sources, that can be simplified by not using /usr/src at all. Use out-of-tree builds with the source pointing to the Git repository, then you don't need a spare exported copy of the kernel sources.