On 9/12/23 10:15 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 09:47:40AM +0200, Donald Buczek wrote:
>> On 9/11/23 15:54, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>>> We have never guaranteed that Kconfig options will never change in
>>> stable kernel releases, sorry.
>>
>> I didn't want to imply that and I don't expect it.
>>
>> It's just _if_ stable really gradually opens up to anything (like code
>> removals, backports of new features, heuristically or AI selected
>> patches, performance patches) it IMO loses its function and we could
>> as well follow mainline, which, I think, is what you are recommending
>> anyway.
>
> When code is removed from stable kernel versions, it is usually for very
> good reasons, like what happened here. Sorry I can't go into details,
> but you really wanted this out of your kernel, this was a bugfix :)
Thanks. I understand that this topic can not be discussed and take your word.
>> We've had bad surprises with more or less every mainline releases
>> while updates in a stable series could be trusted to go 99% without
>> thinking. Keeping productions systems on some latest stable gave us
>> the time to identifying and fix problems with newer series before
>> making it the designated series for all systems. This worked well.
>>
>> If the policy of stable gradually changes, that's tough luck for us. I
>> wouldn't complain but it would be good to know. And maybe
>> Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rs should be reviewed.
>
> If the policy changes, we will change that document, but for now, we are
> backporting only bugfixes that are found through explicit tagging,
> developer requests, manual patch review, and "compare this commit to
> past commits that were accepted" matching which then gets manual review.
Hmmmm, okay. For an apparent counter-example, just yesterday we had to learn about 4921792e04f2125b ("drm/amdgpu: install stub fence into potential unused fence pointers") [1] the hard way [2].
[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/stable/20230724012419.2317649-13-sashal@xxxxxxxxxx/t/#u
[2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2820#note_2080918
Does "compare this commit to past commits that were accepted" include anything AUTOSELected?
Best
Donald
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>
--
Donald Buczek
buczek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tel: +49 30 8413 1433
