Kernel 2.6.16 for Dapper LTS?

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 11:23:17AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 05:28:57PM -0400, David Walker wrote:
> > Has there been any thought into the usability of dapper 2, 3, or 4 years 
> > from now?  Since it will be a supported system for 5, hardware in the 
> > next few years be incompatible with the current kernel.  Or new hardware 
> > may only have support with some nifty new features in Linux3.0.  So is 
> > the hardware of the future going to be supported, or is the support of 
> > dapper limited to hardware currently available at the release?
> 
> We expect that the bulk of the requirement for a long-term supported
> release will consist of installations performed not too long after the
> release of dapper on hardware that's broadly supported by dapper; after
> all, if you're doing an install four years from now, then you might as
> well just install with dapper+8, as that'll be supported for 18 months
> from then.
But what about the intermediate case of dapper+4 (8.04?) - it's likely
that there will be some new hardware around two years from now (new disk
controllers being the most likely troublesome ones), but 8.04 would be
supported for 18months, whereas dapper would still have 3 years to run,
making it a better choice for a server, /if/ it has the driver support
to get it installed.

> It's not necessarily inconceivable to add more hardware support, but I
> don't think it's the most important part of long-term support.
>
I disagree; I can think of at least two circumstances under which I
might want to use dapper on future hardware. Firstly if I have several
machines running dapper, then I add another in the future; for sake of
consistency I'd likely want to install the same system as all the other
already have. Secondly, I've done 'brain transplants' on systems before
where I've shifted a perfectly good running system to higher spec
hardware as a way to boost the performance with minimal downtime.

FWIW Redhat find it necessary/useful to backport quite a lot of drivers
to the RHEL kernels, as well as releasing some limitted application
feature upgrade in their big periodic batched updates. As another point
of comparison there are the numerous 3rd party hacks that circulated in
the latter days of Debian Woody to install it on to SATA systems etc.

The RHEL case is particularly interesting from the POV of certification
like the IBM DB2 one - the certifications seem to cover not just the
original distro, but the distro plus officially issued updates. The cert
would /not/ cover the distro plus a custom kernel, so the only way to get
a certified dapper system on future hardware would be to have official
updates to dapper.

Ewan
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