Thanks for the response, Valdis. Thanks, Avinash On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 10:54 AM Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks@xxxxxx> wrote: > > On Fri, 01 Nov 2019 14:24:26 -0700, Avinash Patil said: > > Hi Greg, > > I'm not Greg, but... :) > > > I am curious as to why Linux4.19 which was released later has earlier > > EOL than 4.14? > > Not all stable releases are kept going for the same amount of time. Most go > EOL as soon as a few newer releases have come out, while every 5th one or so is > kept going for longer. > > > If we have to choose one version over another for BSP, which one is preferred? > > If you're planning to dump unsupported crap on customers, it doesn't matter. > Let's face it - if you're not going to provide updates, when a stable stream > EOLs doesn't matter if you ship 4.19.81 or 4.14.151, because your customers > aren't ever going to get 4.19.104 or 4.14.183. > > But you probably want to base the BSP on 4.19 so that your customers get the benefit > of all the stuff that got fixed between 4.14 and 4.19. Remember that only a *very* small > fraction of fixes - those that qualify under Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst > get included in the stable tree. > > And of course, unless you have no intention of building similar boards in the future, > it's a good idea to upstream any custom drivers. That way, when your follow-on > BSP gets based to the 5.11 kernel, your drivers are already in-tree, and even more > importantly, already updated to any 5.11 kernel API changes, because anybody who > changed a kernel API was required to update your driver for you. > > (And no, "We only plan to sell 50,000 so it's not worth it" is not a valid excuse. There's > plenty of stuff that's in-tree that's very niche with only a few users. Heck, we kept > an entire architecture (the i386 Voyager) around for 2 machines. Not two models, > two physical machines. We finally dropped it when James Bottomley was unable to > mix-and-match parts from the two machines to get either one to boot....) > _______________________________________________ Kernelnewbies mailing list Kernelnewbies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
