[arch-general] kernel-lts ....

[Jan de Groot]

On Sun, 2010-01-31 at 10:34 -0600, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> 
> .... I am new to the list, used Linux since Caldera 2.2. I noticed 
> references to a kernel-lts, labelled as 'long-time-support' on the Arch 
> website. I did a bit of googling & noticed references to such from Arch 
> & Ubuntu forums. I found no references at kernel.org, although I noticed 
> that they listed an upgrade to kernel 2.6.27.45, same number as the 
> '-lts' kernel in Arch. Is the 'lts' kernel project Arch/Ubuntu-specific, 
> or (semi-?) supported from kernel.org ? Also, I noticed that the 
> bleeding edge kernels (seem to) include firmware packages, but I didn't 
> see them for the lts kernels, did I just miss them or are they absent 
> from the 'lts' series of kernels ? TIA ....

The -lts kernels are stable kernels as maintained by kernel.org people.
The 2.6.27 kernel has been maintained as stable kernel for 2-3 years
now. When we added the kernel, our intentions were to have a maintained
stable kernel that doesn't bring surprises after a security update,
something that going from 2.6.31 -> 2.6.32 won't offer you.

The firmware binaries were included in drivers before, they've been
split to standalone files in later versions of the kernel. That's why
2.6.27 doesn't come with a -firmware package.