Ubuntu Begins Offering A Rolling Release Kernel For The Amazon Cloud

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Begins Offering A Rolling Release Kernel For The Amazon Cloud

Canonical is transitioning Ubuntu's support in the Amazon AWS environment to have a rolling-release model for its kernel albeit other packages will remain under their traditional stable release update handling. At least though it's good they will be more punctually offering new kernel versions in the cloud..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Rolling-Kernel-AWS

[fguerraz]

Nooooo! This is the most stupidest terrible idea!

Last year they arleady shipped a kernel update with THP changed from always to madvise and that took us ages to find where our performance regression was coming from! The whole point of using ubuntu/debian/rhel/etc is that they are not rolling releases!

[Pranos]

It looks like you can choose, so i dont see a problem.

[dlq84]

Nooooo! This is the most stupidest terrible idea!

Last year they arleady shipped a kernel update with THP changed from always to madvise and that took us ages to find where our performance regression was coming from! The whole point of using ubuntu/debian/rhel/etc is that they are not rolling releases!

Please read the whole article before commenting

[jacob]

A rolling kernel for production deployment?

[anarki2]

Compared to bare metal deployments where there is the greater risk of hardware quirks/regressions with a more rapidly moving kernel, offering new kernel releases for Ubuntu in the cloud should be more sane

That's an odd comment given the whole purpose of a kernel is interacting with the hardware. For example, IO is still HW interaction, virtualized or not. A VM might have fewer hardware parts, but that doesn't make it orders of magnitude less vulnerable to regressions. That very list

task scheduling, I/O scheduling, networking, hypervisor guests and containers

is a perfect bunch of examples of possible regression areas.

In any case, I don't see how this is any different from the current hwe and hwe-edge kernel packages. Those have been around for ages, and this current "rolling" release is the same 5.3 kernel you get with hwe-edge on 18.04 Desktop. It seems more like a branding thing than anything else. But I don't understand how sticking to the 19.10 kernel release is "rolling". The current "rolling" kernel version is 5.6, not 5.3.

[TemplarGR]

A rolling kernel for production deployment?

Why not?

[amehaye]

Why not?

[jabl]

That's an odd comment given the whole purpose of a kernel is interacting with the hardware. For example, IO is still HW interaction, virtualized or not. A VM might have fewer hardware parts, but that doesn't make it orders of magnitude less vulnerable to regressions.

I suspect the difference is that Canonical can test with the exact same AWS HW that their customers will eventually use. For bare-metal, there's an impossibly long tail of things they'll never test.

[Danny3]

It never stop to amaze me the stupidity of Canonical decisions.
They use old software (kernel 5.4, Qt 5.12, etc.) on desktop distro and cutting edge software on server distro ???
Normally I would say that someone makes a joke, but knowing Canonical that takes every crappy road just to abbandon it a few years later, I know this is true.