> From: 'gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2018 06:55 > > ... > > This is to say, we're requesting a backport of 4 patches or 28 patches. > > If 28 patches seem too many, we hope at least the 4 patches can be > backported. > > 28 seems odd, there's lots of things in there that you do not need. Yes, some of the 28 patches are completely unnecessary for a "stable" kernel, but some are fixes for other known issues. Only backporting the minimal amount of the patches can't work due to merge conflicts, so I generated the 28-patch list which can be applied cleanly in order. > So 4 is good, can you send all 4 as a patch series, properly backported > and tested with this patch as the last one? I'm OK with only backporting the 4 patches for this particular issue reported by Wang Jian. Maybe we can backport more fixes in future if people report new KVP issues against the 4.4 kernel. So I'm going to send all the 4 patches as a patch series. Wang Jian has tested them. > But, I really want to know why people are still trying to use the 4.4 > kernel right now for a "general purpose" system. They should be using > 4.9 at the very least by now, 4.4 is not a good idea at all. Why can > you not just move your users to 4.9 instead of a newer 4.4 kernel? It > should be the exact same, right? > greg k-h We definitely encourage users to use new kernels like 4.9 and 4.1x, but it looks some users have to use their customized 4.4 kernels due to some reason I don't know (believe it or not, except Wang Jian, I have made the same private backport twice for two companies since July). And Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS (http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04/), which is based on v4.4, also has the same KVP bug: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/ubuntu/ubuntu-xenial.git/tree/Makefile?h=Ubuntu-4.4.0-137.163 And I did receive a bug report from a Ubuntu user last week. Ubuntu 16.04 will reach End-of-Life on April 2021 -- still 2.5 years left since now. So I hope after the 4 patches are merged into the upstream 4.4.y branch, the Ubuntu guys will notice them and pick them up. Thanks, -- Dexuan
