Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [Stable kernel] feature backporting collaboration

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

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On Fri, 2016-09-02 at 10:55 -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-09-02 at 07:42 -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Fri, 2016-09-02 at 10:54 +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> > >  
> > > It's what people are doing for products, they want newer features
> > > but they also don't want to rebase their product kernel onto 
> > > mainline as that's an even bigger integration risk.  People 
> > > aren't using this kernel raw, they're using it as the basis for 
> > > product kernels.  What this is doing is getting a bunch of people 
> > > using the same backports which shares effort and hopefully makes 
> > > it more likely that some of the security relevant features will
> > > get deployed in products. 
> > 
> > 
> > And history repeats itself: this is almost the precise rationale 
> > the distros used for all their out of tree patches in their 2.4
> > enterprise kernels.  The disaster that ended up with (patch sets 
> > bigger than the kernel itself with no way of getting them all 
> > upstream) is what led directly to their upstream first policy.
> > 
> > The fact that all the distros track upstream more closely also 
> > means it's better tested: the farther away from upstream you move, 
> > the more problems you'll have.
> > 
> What exactly is the business case for re-learning the same
> lesson the hard way, anyway?

It costs a lot less to learn from history instead of repeating it. 
 But, I suppose, it's not my money being wasted.

> The embedded people can either learn from the mistakes the
> distro vendors made in the 2.4 era, which was repeated by
> the Android kernel team later on, or they can choose to
> repeat that mistake and learn things the hard way.
> 
> With 6-9 month time to market on products, do you really
> have time for a 12 month rebase of a gigantic pile of
> patches?

You mean keep feeding them crack until they either die in an alley or
seek rehab?  It's a view, I suppose ... I just hate the idea that we
know why the behaviour is counterproductive and we have examples to
prove it, we just can't convince the addicts.  It seems socially inept
somehow.

James

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