Vote for your Kernel(s) to be kept!

[SebastianB]

Hi, new manjaro user here.

Personally i have a laptop with a built in wifi thats pretty unreliable on anything above linux34, its a realtek card identifiying itself as some intel piece(i can get the lspci -nn -v entry if someone cares about the specifics).

So for what its worth i want to speak up that regressions are real(tm), i got first hand evidence of that.

Personally i like the 3.4 kernel, its a nice lower bound. The 3.10 is doing great aswell while i don't see much sense in running 3.8, SES or not. Can't imagine there being alot of new hardware/drivers in 3.8 that already have regressed in 3.10. Regarding non-LTS kernel i think it would be wise to have latest + latest-1. Personally i like lagging behind by one version on my desktop, that way people can skip the sometimes buggy single digit minors of a new kernel while still offering it for those that really want to be on he bleeding edge.

Ideal would be imho(referring https://www.kernel.org/):
1. Old LTS(3.4, skipping 2.6.32 since its EOL mid 2014) <-- Good for server
2. Second newest LTS(currently 3.10) <-- general purpose
3. Newest LTS(currently 3.12) <-- general purpose with recent hardware, good choice for install media imho
4. Stable -1(currently also 3.12) <-- trailing stable
5. Stable (currently 3.13) <-- Stable

Reason for 2. is same as for 4. LTS doesn't mean its stable right now, it means it gets support longer(and thus become more stable over time), a kernel can get that tag very early in its life.

P.S.: Kernel 3.11 is pointless imho. It has better hardware support on certain common hardware than 3.10, but not as good as 3.12. And if you don't have the specific hardware you might aswell run 3.10. I don't dislike canonicals kernel patches, but i don't see anything special about 3.8 and 3.11 either. Only reason Canonical runs support for them is because they happen to be the kernels that where out when they released their distribution majors. On the other hand im a little bit interested in the RH kernel patchsets, they port back more than security fixes and have longer support than Canonicals. Would be interested how their RHEL 2.6 kernel compares feature wise to the 3 LTS mentioned above ...

P.P.S.: BTW last time i used manjaro with a 3.8 kernel it broke btrfs support. I.e. the btrfs-progs in the manjaro repo created btrfs partitions that where not mountable with a 3.8 kernel, that was pretty nasty.

[jaskerx]

According to https://www.kernel.org/releases.html the 3.4 kernel is only supported until Oct 2014 so you have some time left. I'm curious to know how many kernels the devs want to support?

[SebastianB]

Actually im having some success(actually running perfect) with the recent 3.13 kernels. No loss of connection or weird slowdowns ... Im certain that kernels 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11 and 3.12 didn't work. Imho that only underscores the benefit of having a wide spread of kernels to choose from. There is little benefit in having f.e. a 3.8, 3.10 and 3.11 kernel, but a 3.4, 3.10 and 3.12/13/14 spread is likely going to turn out useful to atleast some people.

Out of curiosity, why is manjaro running kernel patchsets from Canonical, and not from Red Hat(Centos/Fedora), openSuSE, Gentoo or Debian? Just wondering wether there is a technical reason or they "just happened to patch the kernels we wanted to have patched anyway" kind of thing.

[Rob]

Out of curiosity, why is manjaro running kernel patchsets from Canonical, and not from Red Hat(Centos/Fedora), openSuSE, Gentoo or Debian? Just wondering wether there is a technical reason or they "just happened to patch the kernels we wanted to have patched anyway" kind of thing.

That is basically it. We're certainly not against kernels maintained by the distros you mentioned.

Debian's 3.2 kernel doesn't seem necessary when we have the 3.4 series in such a mature state.
RHEL's 2.6.32 kernel i'm pretty sure will be too old for our userspace and simply won't work, plus i think the 3.4 kernel would be covering all use cases.
openSUSE's current Evergreen kernel is the 3.11 series, same as Canonical's current kernel
As for Gentoo, I'm not sure which kernels they maintain (I thought they were leading edge and didn't maintain kernels in-house). We do actually include some patches in our kernels that are sourced from Gentoo.


EDIT: Back on the 3.11 series; when Canonical drop it's support in a few months, we could look at using openSUSE patches, but it'll fast become hard to justify keeping it when the 2 kernel series on either side of it (3.10 and 3.12) are both 'official' (i.e. kernel upstream developers) LTS kernels. Presumably one of them will cover any use case.

[SebastianB]

That is basically it. We're certainly not against kernels maintained by the distros you mentioned.

Debian's 3.2 kernel doesn't seem necessary when we have the 3.4 series in such a mature state.
RHEL's 2.6.32 kernel i'm pretty sure will be too old for our userspace and simply won't work, plus i think the 3.4 kernel would be covering all use cases.
openSUSE's current Evergreen kernel is the 3.11 series, same as Canonical's current kernel
As for Gentoo, I'm not sure which kernels they maintain (I thought they were leading edge and didn't maintain kernels in-house). We do actually include some patches in our kernels that are sourced from Gentoo.


EDIT: Back on the 3.11 series; when Canonical drop it's support in a few months, we could look at using openSUSE patches, but it'll fast become hard to justify keeping it when the 2 kernel series on either side of it (3.10 and 3.12) are both 'official' (i.e. kernel upstream developers) LTS kernels. Presumably one of them will cover any use case.

Oh i think you might be surprised about Red Hats 2.6.32 kernel. http://lwn.net/Articles/486304/ is a rather old article about it, but even back then it already had over 7700 patches applied to it. And it got pretty recent hardware support including backported btrfs, CFS scheduler etc. And they will continue backporting hardware and drivers till 2016 for it and security till atleast 2020 or 2023(https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata/). Now im not saying i want to run that thing on manjaro but you have to admit that what they are doing is pretty interesting from a technical pov(and afaik noone else is doing it that way), and RHEL 7 with a recent kernel is right around the corner. Also that live patching of a running kernel they are talking about ...

But i digress, you are all doing an awesome job with manjaro. It not only runs beautifully, it actually has a pretty smart design behind it and i actually prefer it over arch, and not for the installation but actual day-to-day features like mhwd, the multiple kernel choices and having packages rolling through stable/testing/unstable repositories.

[Rob]

Oh i think you might be surprised about Red Hats 2.6.32 kernel. http://lwn.net/Articles/486304/ is a rather old article about it, but even back then it already had over 7700 patches applied to it. And it got pretty recent hardware support including backported btrfs, CFS scheduler etc. And they will continue backporting hardware and drivers till 2016 for it and security till atleast 2020 or 2023(https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata/). Now im not saying i want to run that thing on manjaro but you have to admit that what they are doing is pretty interesting from a technical pov(and afaik noone else is doing it that way)

It is interesting I agree, but I fear systemd wouldn't want to run on it. Red Hat don't use systemd in their 6.5 release.

At a minimum, you need 2.6.36 for the cgroup API FS mounted at /sys/fs/cgroup

Source: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=913573#p913573

[Ace]

Please keep 3.11. Since the most recent catalyst drivers, it is the most stable with accelerated video.

[mardt]

Minimum 3.11 on 3.10 my lan on hp 7800p dont work intel e1000e on 3.11 and up work like a charm

[salome]

Mantain kernels 3.10, 3.12 and 3.13 series, drop 3.4 and 3.11 (3.8 is already dropped in testing).

and maybe, you could set zram and zswap by default (but I don't remember if 3.10 series support zswap)

[jmartins]

My sugestion is mantain only one version below the kernel current version and the new manjaro releases always use the current kernel.org version

And set zram and zswap by default.

regards,
Joao

[jmartins]

Another suggestion is use the https://gnunet.org/cryogenic

regard,
João

[kike1965]

Done, linux310 

[rudefyet]

I absolutely need 3.10 for now. 3.12+ causes data corruption on my system.

[LCJr]

Could we get 2.6 or a little earlier so I can run Manjaro on my AMD K6-2?

[Rob]

I absolutely need 3.10 for now. 3.12+ causes data corruption on my system.

3.10 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.