Re: Change to FreeBSD release scheduling etc.

On 7/15/24 15:05, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 3:57 PM Colin Percival <cperciva@freebsd.org 
> <mailto:cperciva@freebsd.org>> wrote:
>     Flavouring kernel module ports for each minor release -- possibly building in
>     in an oldest-supported-release jail but with the relevant /usr/src/sys tree --
>     might work well?  But that's a question for portmgr; I don't know enough about
>     how package building works to know how feasible this would be.
> 
> People have talked about "stacking" repos to accomplish this. We'd build per-minor
> release images for .ko's. I'm not sure what the sticking points are for doing 
> this,
> though.

That would be good, but drm-14.1-61-kmod-6.1.69_2 (aka have multiple versions
of ports and require users to kmod packages to pick the right now) would be
better than what we have now.

> Ideally, we'd keep the same KBI per major release, but that ideal has fallen
> short.

Having a stable KBI only solves half of the problem.  With DRM especially it's
useful for people running the latest minor release to use kmods which make use
of functionality which was added in the latest release before the previous
release is EoLed.

-- 
Colin Percival
FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid