On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 1:12 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>
wrote:

> On Thu, 29 Sep 2016, Aaron Wood wrote:
>
> While you think 3.10 is old, in my experience it's still seen as cutting
>> edge by many.  RHEL is still only at 3.10.  And routers are using much
>> older 3.x kernels.  There's a huge lag between what the "enterprise" crowd
>> is running in production, and what you guys are developing on. Because
>> "stability".
>>
>> It's been one of my major frustrations (especially on the embedded side
>> where 3.x kernels are still considered 'new' and 2.6.x is 'trusted').
>>
>
> State of affairs are actually improving. What I'm seeing from several SoC
> vendors is that they're moving from a "new kernel every 3 years, and we'll
> choose a 2 year old kernel when doing the work so it'll be 5 years old by
> the time a new one comes around, with the result that a lot of devices are
> on 2.6.26, 3.2 and 3.4), to a model where they actually do a new kernel
> every 6 months, and they'll choose a kernel that's around 12-18 months old
> at that time.
>
> This is of course not great, but it's an improvement. I'm pushing for SoC
> vendors to actually upstream their patches as much as possible and support
> creation of kernel version independent HAL/API in the kernel that they can
> write their drivers for.
>

It's a great improvement over where things were.  I hope it continues.  I
know I'll be supporting it professionally when I can.

-Aaron