On Wed, Jul 09, 2025 at 11:23:36AM -0500, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
There is no indication that the kexec code path has ever been exercised.
So this appears to be one of those changes that was merged under the banner of "Let's see if this causes a regression".
To the original authors. I would have appreciated it being a little more clearly called out in the change description that this came in under "Let's see if this causes a regression".
Such changes should not be backported automatically. They should be backported with care after the have seen much more usage/testing of the kernel they were merged into. Probably after a kernel release or so. This is something that can take some actual judgment to decide, when a backport is reasonable.
I'm assuming that you also refer to stable tagged patches that get "automatically" picked up, right?
We already have a way to do what you suggest: maintainers can choose not to tag their patches for stable, and have both their subsystem and/or individual contributions ignored by AUTOSEL. This way they can send us commits at their convenience.
There is one subsystem that is mostly doing that (XFS).
The other ones are *choosing* not to do that.