LTS kernel 4.14 on 18.04

[Fabian Grünbichler]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 03:13:55PM +0000, Fabio Colella wrote:
> Hi all,
> I read in the recent kernel news that the tentative plan is to converge on
> 4.15 for the bionic cycle. My question is then, why not 4.14, which is an
> LTS kernel supported for 6 years,  up to 2023, which will receive a lot of
> attention, also on the smartphones and IoT side?
> 
> I'm not saying Ubuntu 18.04 *should* use 4.14, but given that it seems to
> come with many advantages on the stability and safety side, what are the
> advantages of 4.15 over 4.14?
> 
> Could possibly useful 4.15 features be cherry picked and backported to 4.14
> instead of shipping the whole 4.15 and then having to support it with less
> cooperation from upstream?
> 
> In the eventuality of bionic shipping with 4.15, would 4.14 still be
> available in the official repos (or as a kernel snap)?
> 

since subsequent kernel team newsletters just repeated the same language
over and over without giving any more details, and there have been no
(public?) answers to this mail, allow me to second this inquiry:

what are the specific reasons for targeting 4.15 and not 4.14 for
bionic?

4.14 is an upstream LTS release with at least 2.5[1] years overlap in
support with the bionic release, which seems like a huge advantage
compared to the regular < 6 months upstream support of 4.15 (especially
given the track record of 4.13, which was far from stellar). by the time
bionic gets released, 4.14 will also have received a lot more testing
compared to 4.15 (which will likely be out for 2 months at that point,
and EOL upstream soon after).

if there are big enough blockers slated for 4.15 which did not make the
cut for 4.14, it would probably help to name them in order to make the
decision more transparent to users and downstreams. thanks!

1: April '18 til January '20