[Ksummit-2013-discuss] [ATTEND] stable patches; cgroup changes

[Greg KH]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 09:25:22PM +0800, Li Zefan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to attend this year's Kernel Summit.
> 
> I'm co-maintaining cgroup and cpuset with Tejun. In Huawei I'm working in
> the kernel team, and I'm responsible for maintaining our kernels.
> 
> I'm mostly interested in the following two topics.
> 
> (1) stable patches
> 
> Some departments have been analyzing upstream commits and see if some of them
> are not in stable tree but can/should be backported, but they never feedback
> the result to the community.
> 
> While in the kernel team I'm working in, we have been much more open, and we've
> started to help patch backport in stable mailing list.
> 
> While Greg has been doing great, one of my observation is we do have some upstream
> commits missing from stable tree for various reasons:
> 
> - some developers/maintainers don't care about stable branches;
> - people have different criterion on what patches should be queued for stable;
> - the patch can't be applied cleanly, and then no one pays attention to the
> notice sent by Greg;
> - if the patch can be applied to most recent stable version, but failed on earlier
> verions, you won't be warned.
> 
> For example, the bugs fixed in these two commits can crash the kernel, but they are
> not tagged for stable:
> 
> 	9c5da09d266ca9b32eb16cf940f8161d949c2fe5
> 	a6572f84c5b135d9b6df279ed3c8de028bd1edd9
> 
> commit 6a76f8c0ab19f215af2a3442870eeb5f0e81998d is a CVE fix and was queued for 3.8,
> but missing from 3.4. (then I did the backport)
> 
> commit 14611e51a57df10240817d8ada510842faf0ec51 has been queued for 3.10 only, but
> actually the bug exists in older verions too. (I'm planning to do the backport)
> 
> So are we happy with the current status, or do we need to do something so that
> less bug fixes are missing in stable?

I want to do whatever is possible to ensure that known bug fixes for
issues like what you have documented here, end up in the stable trees.
If there's anything I can do to talk to the team of people that you
describe above as doing this type of work, yet not telling me about it,
I would be more than willing to do so.

thanks,

greg k-h