Four stable kernel updates [LWN.net]

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced another round of stable kernel updates: 6.8.5, 6.6.26, 6.1.85, and 5.15.154 have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes, including the mitigations for the recently disclosed branch history injection hardware vulnerability.

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Four stable kernel updates

Posted Apr 11, 2024 7:09 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link] (1 responses)

The stable kernel process continues to seem somewhat, erm, unstable! Given the recent minor debacle over the workqueue patches, I wonder if it's all just running too fast? I know Greg has an impossible job, but these updates went to -rc3 status, then seemingly got pushed out early (the review was supposed to last until late on the 11th). Given the general overload factor and the speed of development, how much can we trust stable kernels to really be stable? Disclosure - I'm trying to do my bit by running/testing bleeding edge, for the first time in years. So I'm currently running 6.9-rc3 (via the Ubuntu PPA packages) on my fairly ordinary AMD laptop, and so far not a hitch.

Four stable kernel updates

Posted Apr 13, 2024 4:53 UTC (Sat) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445) [Link]

For the case of Linux kernels, the meaning of the "stable" label is (in reality) relative to the high rate of change (ie. instability) in Linus's git development repo. In that sense, kernel 6.8.5 is more stable than kernel 6.9-rc3 (the in-development 6.9 kernel). Further observations about the "stable" misnomer are here.

The only truly stable Linux kernels are the likes of RHEL kernels, with carefully cherry-picked fixes and backports, along with extensive QA, all paid for by subscriptions to RHEL. Debian and Ubuntu LTS have rough approximations of this process with their own stable kernels, which tend to be newer than RHEL.