On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 12:30:19PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>On Mon, 16 Apr 2018 16:19:14 +0000
>Sasha Levin <Alexander.Levin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> >Wait! What does that mean? What's the purpose of stable if it is as
>> >broken as mainline?
>>
>> This just means that if there is a fix that went in mainline, and the
>> fix is broken somehow, we'd rather take the broken fix than not.
>>
>> In this scenario, *something* will be broken, it's just a matter of
>> what. We'd rather have the same thing broken between mainline and
>> stable.
>
>Honestly, I think that removes all value of the stable series. I
>remember when the stable series were first created. People were saying
>that it wouldn't even get to more than 5 versions, because the bar for
>backporting was suppose to be very high. Today it's just a fork of the
>kernel at a given version. No more features, but we will be OK with
>regressions. I'm struggling to see what the benefit of it is suppose to
>be?
It's not "OK with regressions".
Let's look at a hypothetical example: You have a 4.15.1 kernel that has
a broken printf() behaviour so that when you:
pr_err("%d", 5)
Would print:
"Microsoft Rulez"
Bad, right? So you went ahead and fixed it, and now it prints "5" as you
might expect. But alas, with your patch, running:
pr_err("%s", "hi!")
Would show a cat picture for 5 seconds.
Should we take your patch in -stable or not? If we don't, we're stuck
with the original issue while the mainline kernel will behave
differently, but if we do - we introduce a new regression.
So it's not the case that a -stable kernel will have *more* regression,
it'll just have similar ones to mainline.