Adding the kernel list on CC because this is a good question and there's no reason to not answer a broader number of people.
On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Andrew Lutomirski andy@luto.us wrote:
Other than the bug I filed, 4.3 is missing two things for full Dell Skylake support:
The Broadcom driver, available in 4.4, needed for WiFi on some models.
Have to think about this. We tend to avoid full driver backports and 4.4.y will be released fairly soon. I don't believe 4.3 will live very long in F23, perhaps a month at most so doing a full backport might not be worthwhile.
The intel-hid driver, queued for 4.5, needed for the WiFi button on all models.
Similar answer. We'd be more likely to backport it to 4.4 than 4.3. And in both this and the above case, it would probably have to go into rawhide and live there for a while to get some testing.
I don't know about the former, but the latter is self-contained and trivial to backport. What's your/Fedora's opinion on driver backports?
So we have no fast and hard rules, but as I said we tend to avoid full driver backports. Feature additions to existing driver and bugfixes are much easier to carry. In either case, the code needs to be upstream or very clearly headed there in a not distant release. It's probably best to think of our approach as a slightly less restrictive version of the upstream stable process. We'll occasionally take things from trees other than Linus' but only if it looks like it is heading there soon anyway.
And we reserve the right to break our own approach :).
There are also some pending dell-wmi fixes, but they fix warnings instead of adding missing functionality.
There's been some back and forth on those IIRC. Probably not worth grabbing for 4.3 at this point.
josh
On 01/07/2016 12:25 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
Adding the kernel list on CC because this is a good question and there's no reason to not answer a broader number of people.
On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Andrew Lutomirski andy@luto.us wrote:
Other than the bug I filed, 4.3 is missing two things for full Dell Skylake support:
The Broadcom driver, available in 4.4, needed for WiFi on some models.
Have to think about this. We tend to avoid full driver backports and 4.4.y will be released fairly soon. I don't believe 4.3 will live very long in F23, perhaps a month at most so doing a full backport might not be worthwhile.
The intel-hid driver, queued for 4.5, needed for the WiFi button on all models.
Similar answer. We'd be more likely to backport it to 4.4 than 4.3. And in both this and the above case, it would probably have to go into rawhide and live there for a while to get some testing.
I don't know about the former, but the latter is self-contained and trivial to backport. What's your/Fedora's opinion on driver backports?
So we have no fast and hard rules, but as I said we tend to avoid full driver backports. Feature additions to existing driver and bugfixes are much easier to carry. In either case, the code needs to be upstream or very clearly headed there in a not distant release. It's probably best to think of our approach as a slightly less restrictive version of the upstream stable process. We'll occasionally take things from trees other than Linus' but only if it looks like it is heading there soon anyway.
If a driver is actually present in Linus' tree, I'd encourage interested users to test a rawhide kernel. If it's working there, there's a much stronger case to consider pulling it into a stable branch.
Thanks, Laura
kernel@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Josh Boyer -
Laura Abbott