I have a deep-seated bias toward supporting collaboration. One of the ways we make collaboration easier is through the stable release process, which allows teams to work asynchronously. I expect a stable kernel to benefit people in many audiences:
- In the general case, I often hear people complain about hardware support regressions after kernel feature upgrades. I myself was unable to use Fedora kernels 6.15+ on Fedora 42 because my trackpad wasn’t usable on newer kernels. A stable kernel ensures security patches to users affected by regressions.
- In the case of systems that use out-of-tree modules (including NVIDIA’s in the context of this proposal, but also things like VirtualBox or ZFS), a stable kernel provides support for the use of third-party kernel modules while they are ported to new kernel interfaces.
An additional kernel would present greater QE overhead. I don’t want to deny that. But I do think that the testing process around Fedora kernels today has serious flaws. The rolling kernel necessitates testing days mid-release, which does not align well with the concept of a stable release. But more importantly, even if users participate in testing days and report regressions, there just isn’t any realistic alternative to shipping the new release series as an update. By the time Fedora prepares a new kernel release series and organizes a test day, support for the previous release series has ended upstream. We can take bug reports regarding regressions, but there isn’t much we can do with them.