Linux Distributors' Alliance Continues Long-Term Support for Linux 4.14

'Until recently, Linux kernel developers have been the ones keeping long-term support (LTS) versions of the Linux kernel patched and up to date,' writes ZDNet.

'Then, because it was too much work with too little support, the Linux kernel developers decided to no longer support the older kernels.'

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, announced that the Linux 4.14.336 release was the last maintenance update to the six-year-old LTS Linux 4.14 kernel series. It was the last of the line for 4.14. Or was it?

Kroah-Hartman had stated, 'All users of the 4.14 kernel series must upgrade.' Maybe not. OpenELA, a trade association of the Linux distributors CIQ (the company backing Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE, is now offering — via its kernel-lts — a new lease on life for 4.14.

This renewed version, tagged with the following format — x.y.z-openela — is already out as v4.14.339-openela. The OpenELA acknowledges the large debt they owe to Kroah-Hartman and Sasha Levin of the Linux Kernel Stable project but underlines that their project is not affiliated with them or any of the other upstream stable maintainers. That said, the OpenELA team will automatically pull most LTS-maintained stable tree patches from the upstream stable branches. When there are cases where patches can't be applied cleanly, OpenELA kernel-lts maintainers will deal with these issues. In addition, a digest of non-applied patches will accompany each release of its LTS kernel, in mbox format.

'The OpenELA kernel-lts project is the first forum for enterprise Linux distribution vendors to pool our resources,' an Oracle Linux SVP tells ZDNet, 'and collaborate on those older kernels after upstream support for those kernels has ended.' And the CEO of CIQ adds that after community support has ended, 'We believe that open collaboration is the best way to maintain foundational enterprise infrastructure.

'Through OpenELA, vendors, users, and the open source community at large can work together to provide the longevity that professional IT organizations require for enterprise Linux.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.