On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 11:40:31PM +0100, Sebastian Gottschall wrote:
And anyway the end of life has been indicated on kernel.org for 18 months and in every announce in 2017, so it cannot be a surprize anymore :-) At least nobody seemed to complain for all this time!
itsn no surprise for sure, but that also means i have to stay on the old kernel for these special devices and your argument about disable certain parts which simply turned bigger over time is no option
since it would remove features which existed before. its not that i enable all features of the kernel. i use every kernel with the same options (some are adjusted since they are renamed or moved)
Then I have a few questions : - how did you choose this kernel ? Or did you choose the hardware based on the kernel size ? - what would have you done if 3.10 had not been LTS ? - have you at least tried other kernels before claiming they are much larger ? Following your principle, 3.2 should be smaller and 3.16 not much larger. The former offers you about 6 extra months of maintenance, the latter 3.5 years (https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html).
but even then the kernel is turning into a ram and space eating monster if i look on devices with 16 mb ram and 4 mb flash. this is mainly for maintaining older hardware with latest updates.
So why didn't you ask if it was possible to pursue the maintenance a bit a long time ago ? LTS maintenance is a collective effort and is done based on usage. If enough people have good reasons for going further it can be enough a justification to push the deadline. Now it's too late.
the more recent hardware is getting better here
you dont seem to know how it is to work on wireless routers :-)
Yes I do, I've been distributing a full blown load balancer distro on a 10 MB image (running on 3.10 as well). But I also know that sometimes you make some nice space savings on new kernels (xz/zstd compression, ability to remove certain useless stuff in these environments such as FS ACLs or mandatory locks, etc). Sure, upgrading to a new kernel on existing hardware is always a challenge. But it's also an interesting one.
Also just to give you an idea, I've just compared the size of these kernels configured with "make allnoconfig" (and I verified that all of them were compressed using gzip) :
3.10.108 : 875 kB 4.4.97 : 522 kB 4.9.61 : 561 kB 4.14 : 566 kB
So the argument that migrating away from 3.10 is hard due to the size doesn't stand much here :-)
Willy