Linux Kernel Monkey Log

I get a lot of questions about people asking me about what stable kernel should they be using for their product/device/laptop/server/etc. all the time. Especially given the now-extended length of time that some kernels are being supported by me and others, this isn’t always a very obvious thing to determine. So this post is an attempt to write down my opinions on the matter. Of course, you are free to use what ever kernel version you want, but here’s what I recommend.

As many people know, last week there was a court hearing in the Geniatech vs. McHardy case. This was a case brought claiming a license violation of the Linux kernel in Geniatech devices in the German court of OLG Cologne.

Harald Welte has written up a wonderful summary of the hearing, I strongly recommend that everyone go read that first.

In Harald’s summary, he refers to an affidavit that I provided to the court. Because the case was withdrawn by McHardy, my affidavit was not entered into the public record. I had always assumed that my affidavit would be made public, and since I have had a number of people ask me about what it contained, I figured it was good to just publish it for everyone to be able to see it.

Note

This post is based on a whitepaper I wrote at the beginning of 2016 to be used to help many different companies understand the Linux kernel release model and encourage them to start taking the LTS stable updates more often. I then used it as a basis of a presentation I gave at the Linux Recipes conference in September 2017 which can be seen here.

With the recent craziness of Meltdown and Spectre , I’ve seen lots of things written about how Linux is released and how we handle handles security patches that are totally incorrect, so I figured it is time to dust off the text, update it in a few places, and publish this here for everyone to benefit from.

I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and Spectre issues.

These questions all seem to break down into two different categories, “What is the state of the Spectre kernel patches?”, and “Is my machine vunlerable?”

State of the kernel patches

As always, lwn.net covers the technical details about the latest state of the kernel patches to resolve the Spectre issues, so please go read that to find out that type of information.

By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it , you know something is bad…

Anyway, I’m not going to go into the details about the problems being reported, other than to point you at the wonderfully written Project Zero paper on the issues involved here. They should just give out the 2018 Pwnie award right now, it’s that amazingly good.

By Greg Kroah-Hartman, Chris Mason, Rik van Riel, Shuah Khan, and Grant Likely

The Linux kernel ecosystem of developers, companies and users has been wildly successful by any measure over the last couple decades. Even today, 26 years after the initial creation of the Linux kernel, the kernel developer community continues to grow, with more than 500 different companies and over 4,000 different developers getting changes merged into the tree during the past year. As Greg always says every year, the kernel continues to change faster this year than the last, this year we were running around 8.5 changes an hour, with 10,000 lines of code added, 2,000 modified, and 2,500 lines removed every hour of every day.

Based on the recent Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement and the article describing the background and what it means , here are some Questions/Answers to help clear things up. These are based on questions that came up when the statement was discussed among the initial round of over 200 different kernel developers.

Q: Is this changing the license of the kernel?

A: No.

Q: Seriously? It really looks like a change to the license.

As the 4.13 release has now happened, the merge window for the 4.14 kernel release is now open. I mentioned this many weeks ago, but as the word doesn’t seem to have gotten very far based on various emails I’ve had recently, I figured I need to say it here as well.

So, here it is officially, 4.14 should be the next LTS kernel that I’ll be supporting with stable kernel patch backports for at least two years, unless it really is a horrid release and has major problems. If so, I reserve the right to pick a different kernel, but odds are, given just how well our development cycle has been going, that shouldn’t be a problem (although I guess I just doomed it now…)

As I briefly mentioned a few weeks ago on my G+ page, the plan is for the 4.9 Linux kernel release to be the next “Long Term Supported” (LTS) kernel.

Last year, at the Linux Kernel Summit, we discussed just how to pick the LTS kernel. Many years ago, we tried to let everyone know ahead of time what the kernel version would be, but that caused a lot of problems as people threw crud in there that really wasn’t ready to be merged, just to make it easier for their “day job”. That was many years ago, and people insist they aren’t going to do this again, so let’s see what happens.

Now that linux.conf.au is over, there has been a bunch of information running around about the status of kdbus and the integration of it with systemd. So, here’s a short summary of what’s going on at the moment.

Lennart Poettering gave a talk about kdbus at linux.conf.au. The talk can be viewed here, and the slides are here. Go read the slides and watch the talk, odds are, most of your questions will be answered there already.