Product lifecycles and kernel impacts

[Lance Lassetter]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 09:18:45AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I've seen a lot of discussion around release cycles and lifetimes.
> I've not heard any specific requests for what impacts any of the
> current ideas would have to the kernel, but that doesn't mean they
> won't be coming.  We should probably start thinking about various
> things we can support today, what we could possibly support in the
> future, and what we'd need to do it.  I've CC'd the Product liaisons
> so they can see this.  Please keep them on CC.
> 
> The first scenario I can think of is probably some kind of "long-term"
> release.  Exactly what long-term means here is undefined, but we
> already support a Fedora release for 13 months or so.  We do that
> today with rolling kernel releases.  We could possibly continue, but I
> expect the Products to desire something more "stable".
> 
> What that implies is that we'd likely need to base on an upstream
> longterm kernel.  That means:
> 
> 1) No new kernel features.
> 2) No new hardware enablement outside of things acceptable for an
> upstream longterm commit (basically just adding a new USB/PCI id to an
> existing driver).
> 3) Bugfixes will primarily come from the upstream longterm tree
> 4) There will be no alternative kernels supported on the Fedora
> longterm release.
> 5) There are no guarantees on bugfixes, response time, etc.
> 
> If any of the above are desired, people are better off picking an
> Enterprise distro where you have contracted support.
> 
> So if that's the case, the feasibility of this is going to hinge a lot
> on timing.  I would think from a kernel perspective we'd know up-front
> when a Fedora longterm was going to happen, and we'd try and align
> that release with the newest official longterm stable kernel.  Those
> are maintained for 2 years, which seems to be a good fit for a Fedora
> longterm release.  Any longer than that and you're back in the
> Enterprise space again.
> 
> The second scenario I can think of is products with mismatched release
> cycles.  E.g. Server doing a 2 year longterm and developing the
> Server.next release on top of Base, which releases every 6 months.  Or
> Workstation doing a release once a year while Base moves every 6
> months.  Etc.  It's hard to come up with a concrete scenario since
> none of the products have gotten this far.  It's worth noting that
> FESCo is basically disallowing this for the first releases, so this is
> a secondary concern.
> 
> I would propose that for Base, we continue our current method of
> rebasing with each kernel release.  That has been working very well
> for the past few Fedora releases, and gets us the most "bang for the
> buck" in terms of features, hardware support, and fixes. A year long
> release for e.g. Workstation would likely also desire the newer
> support and features, so they could probably just update their kernel
> in the same way.  This keeps our maintenance costs down to today's and
> gives products flexibility.
> 
> In the Server LTS + Server.next development scenario, I would expect
> the LTS to use the longterm kernel as suggested above which means
> whenever they cut over to LTS mode it would need to coincide with an
> upstream longterm kernel.  That would be something we have to watch
> and plan for.  Server.next would continue to use Base until it was
> ready to cut over and repeat.  I hope that makes sense.
> 
> In terms of people, the only major change I see would be the longterm
> addition.  That might be something we can tuck, but having additional
> QA and maintainer resources would allow us to cover development and
> support better.  If there was any major deviation in which kernel was
> used in the various products, we'd likely need either the Product
> teams themselves to pick up maintenance or additional people on the
> kernel team to handle that.  The desire here is to keep the kernel
> common among as many Products and releases as we can.
> 
> This is mostly just some thoughts I've had on the topics so far.  Let
> me know what you all are thinking and please ask questions or propose
> alternatives as you see fit.
> 
> josh
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I would agree with this. I really love Fedora and have been using it since the free Red Hat days...probably since around 1998...

The rapid release cycle that Fedora adopted just doesn't seem for for servers at all.

If Fedora takes this route then why not cut out all server software altogether and just make it a desktop OS.  

What about a Fedora-server version that may last 2 or 3 years?  Before an upgrade is imminent.

In the long run this would seem a good selling point for Fedora in general and if there was an optional donate page before downloading this longer version....

Lance Lassetter