Linux kernel 4.14 gets a life extension, thanks to OpenELA

The Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) has stepped up to maintain Linux kernel version 4.14 - which went out of support in January - to the end of the year. But why that particular version? In the first announcement from the OpenELA this year, the organization announced ongoing maintenance for kernel 4.14 last week. …

[Altrux]

NI RTOS

The RTOS Linux used by NI (LabVIEW) in some of their controllers, uses a 4.14 kernel, in their 2019 release, still widely used. Mind you, it hasn't been updated in ages anyway!

[keithpeter]

cip

Doesn't mesh with the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) 10 year kernels either.

https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/civilinfrastructureplatform/start

The version 4 branch seems to release 4.19 if I have understood the page correctly.

[Liam Proven]

Re: cip

[Author here]

> The version 4 branch seems to release 4.19 if I have understood the page correctly.

Good catch. Thanks for pointing that out to me.

[Tom7]

BSPs

There are plenty of Board Support Packages (BSPs) for embedded hardware out there that have 4.14 as their standard kernel; I use one from Qualcom for a product that's stil being manufactured. It's a puzzle why OpenELA are interested in it, though.

[chasil]

[missing] device drivers

I have Oracle Linux 9 installed on a Dell PowerEdge R710.

The SAS controller on this machine was explicitly removed by RedHat.

And because I can run OL9 on my older machine, I run it on my newer machines, too.

An extensively-tested kernel that will not run on my hardware does me little good.

[Bebu]

Really not a bad idea at all...

if the various EL providers/vendors agreed on a single LTS kernel and libc version for each of their comparable major releases.

Maintenance and back porting efforts would be incentivised by having a much larger target population.

Realistically the vast majority of commercial software is binary only. Probably cannot count the number of times a user has obtained such software only to find that it was built for a distro with kernel and glibc version slightly higher that those of the systems the user has available. There are a few ways around this but none are particularly elegant.

[MarkMLl]

So what can only be installed on v4 kernels?

I've not gone checking version numbers, but, as a specific example, HP (nee Compaq) used to distribute RAID etc. monitoring software in linkable form. All it would take would be one important user of old machines, like the USA's Veterans Administration or some other organ of government.

Alternatively, various American organisations were big users of 32-bit SPARC systems: their manufacturer doesn't want to maintain them and they sure as Hell aren't going to get much support from the Open Source community after they cut off support of the GNU Utilities porting effort.

And for that matter, in around the v4 era somebody developed a nice way of patching a running kernel (which might not work on later versions). It was bought by Oracle...