crash SRU exception feedback for kernel flavors

[Heitor Alves de Siqueira]

Hello kernel-team,

I'm currently working on drafting an SRU exception for the crash tool [0].
Considering crash keeps backwards compatibility with older versions, the
intent would be to ship the latest stable upstream version in all Ubuntu
releases. This would allow one to work with kernel dumps from newer
releases, without necessarily upgrading to them (e.g. open up kernel dumps
from 6.8 in Ubuntu Focal).

My initial intention is to test crash against GA/HWE kernels for all stable
releases, for x86_64 and arm64 arches. This would come down to making sure
crash is able to open and parse kernel dumps from these versions. I'm now
questioning if it'd be necessary to spend additional time testing different
flavors, like -aws, -azure et al. Considering these are essentially
derivatives of their "regular" kernel counterparts, I wouldn't expect there
to be significant differences that'd warrant additional testing.

To summarize, my question would be something along the lines of "if we
ensure crash works against linux-6.8, is there a need to also test
linux-aws-6.8?". My impression is that given those are the same major
kernel versions we'd have sufficient coverage with just the regular GA/HWE
kernels, but I'd like to hear your opinion as well. While there are plans
to automate these tests eventually and include derivative kernels, I'd like
to avoid over-committing to a broader scope than necessary for now.

Please let me know what you think! I'm also open to any feedback on the SRU
exception itself, if you have any.

Thanks,
Heitor

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CrashUpdates
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