Re: Linux 3.10.108 (EOL)

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Am 15.11.2017 um 05:32 schrieb Willy Tarreau:
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 ?

i did not choose it. i port regular all kernels to the platforms i use including 4.4 and 4.9

but a few of these which are already ported to 4.4 and 4.9 will still run 3.10 for resource problems.

   - what would have you done if 3.10 had not been LTS ?
using another LTS at that point :-)
   - 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).

i also used 3.2 before. sure

dont get me wrong i work with all kernels, also with latests. i do also not complain that 3.10 is now EOL

i just wanted to throw some stones on the bloated kernel problem which is increasing


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.

didnt know that. the LTS deadline was defined a long time ago. i follow up the mailing lists mainly for reviewing patches

and reporting feedback if required. if it see such a discussion i may get in touch with it too, but with hundrets of emails every days here its hard to follow anything

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.

i do use xz and i do use a modified squashfs which is even smaller than the xz one in the kernel

smallest router i run with linux has 8 mb ram and 2 mb flash. so i do know how to get all very small. 10 mb image is no issue for me. the 4 mb flashes devices are my problem.



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

its a little bit unrealistic since you have to count in network subsystem, filesystem and drivers.

standard kernel with xz compression is about 800 - 900 kb for me in 3.10 and 4.4 / 4.9 etc. is often more than 1 - 1.2 mb

sometimes just the 100 kb more count in and turn into a problem since i have to remove something from the image to get it fitting

if you are really interested i can give you a real comparisation using a comparable config on 3.10, 4.4 and 4.9 for a standard mips target


So the argument that migrating away from 3.10 is hard due to the size
doesn't stand much here :-)
its turning harder. i already ported 4.4 and 4.9 as i said. so i tried already if they are running or not. they do run, but they are bigger and do not fit for some targets

Willy


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