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