As part of a an effort to streamline developer capacity, the maintainers of gentoo-sources and genpatches have decided to limit past kernel versions to a maximum of 3 years post initial release.
Notes:
- This impacts all kernels that utlize the official genpatches releases as part of their kernel packages including but not limited to the list here [1]
- sys-kernel/vanilla-sources will continue to follow the upstream release and deprecation schedule. Note that the upstream release schedule is showing their LTS kernel support time frames going from six years to four [2]
- gentoo-kernel will also be following this 3 year kernel support and release policy
- In the past, we only supported two versions. With this change, gentoo-sources will still, if enacted today, support 6 versions.
Why should I not run older kernel versions?
- Upstream maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman specifically recommends the following list of preferred kernel versions to choose from in order: [3]
- Supported kernel from your favorite Linux distribution
- Latest stable release
- Latest LTS release
- Older LTS release that is still being maintained
Greg specifically called out Gentoo’s method of consistently rolling out kernels with both security/bug fixes early and keeping up with upstream’s releases.
Gentoo still does and will continue to offer a variety of kernels to choose from with this change.
[1] https://dev.gentoo.org/~mpagano/genpatches/kernels.html
[2] https://kernel.org/category/releases.html
[3] http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2018/08/24/what-stable-kernel-should-i-use/