[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Deprecation / Removal of old hardware support

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2018, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

> Hi Greg,
> 
> On Tuesday, 11 September 2018 22:33:08 EEST Greg KH wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 11:37:25AM +0200, Lukasz Majewski wrote:
> > > In the kernel community we pose a lot of attention to security (for
> > > example the prompt reaction on meltdown/spectre), but in the same time
> > > we tend to forget about the "long lived" devices and force their
> > > maintainers to use 2.6.x kernels..... (or even 2.4.x).
> > 
> > We care, but really, how much can we do here?
> > 
> > I've been working a lot with the Adroid ecosystem to try to help fix
> > their bad habits of "grab a random kernel and ship it and never update
> > it" by providing longer lived kernels that they can constantly update
> > their devices to.
> > 
> > But their lifetimes is much shorter compared to yours, and I have no
> > insight into what kernels are being used, what configurations you all
> > care about, and how long you need/want them updated.
> > 
> > Working with really old kernels like you have, without hardware
> > available to test is a hard task.  If your hardware is in a system like
> > kernelci, then you can be sure that any new kernel will work properly
> > with your system and then you might not want to have to stay with really
> > old kernels that no one can maintain :)
> > 
> > There's a Linux Foundation project, "CIP" that wants to maintain kernels
> > for devices like what you are making for 20+ years.  They are having the
> > problems of not knowing exactly what platforms they wish to support, but
> > their goal is good, hopefully they eventually nail something down and we
> > can work together.  Perhaps you should contact them to try to help solve
> > this issue for everyone?
> 
> I may be wrong, but I understand Lukasz's comment as the exact opposite: we 
> forget about long-lived devices and drop their support while they're still in 
> active use, forcing vendors to start using old and unsupported kernels. If a 
> large number of ARMv4(T) devices are still being actively deployed and 
> maintain, we should treat them as first-class citizens.

But that does not mean, that we have to support ancient compilers
forever. If that stuff needs to be treated as first class citizens then
someone who has vested interest in this needs to fix that. That's none of
our business, really.

Thanks,

	tglx