Backporting is _so_ much work. And it's unfortunately not sexy work either, so it's always going to be hard attracting unpaid contributors for it.
If you need stability and long term support as a customer, you have companies like RedHat or SUSE whose entire point is providing 10+ years maintenance on these components.
Regulations _could_ change the incentives, and create a market for long term servicing. Regulations are hard to get right though...
- Old devices are phased out sooner.
- Moving away from linux towards proprietary embedded OSes that do provide support.
- No doubt some companies will try just ignoring the regulations
It is nice that it makes the cost of not supporting things visible to the users. Assuming “phased out” means the device will actually stop operating; “Company X’s devices have a short lifetime” is an easy thing for people to understand.
I suspect consumers will look for brands that don’t have this reputation, which should give those well behaved brands a boost.
Although, if it does turn out that just letting devices die is the common solution, maybe something will need to be done to account for the additional e-waste that is generated.
Moving toward proprietary OSes; hey, if it solves the problem… although, I don’t see why they’d have an advantage in keeping things up to date.
It is possible that companies will just break the law but then, that’s true of any law.
A smarter regulation would have been required non-commercial use firmware source disclosures to allow non competitive long term maintenance by owners.
How many of the companies producing this stuff have the skills to fix kernel security bugs?
It will end up being tickbox regulatory compliance and will create barriers to competition, especially from FOSS: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-eus-proposed-cra-la...
If the mainline kernel devs are uncomfortable allowing those to be official kernel.org releases, that's fine: the CELC can host the new versions themselves and call the versions something like "5.10.95-celc" or whatever.
I don't get why this is so difficult for people to grasp: if you want long-term maintenance of something, then pay people to maintain it long-term. It's a frighteningly simple concept.
But yes, it'd be better for SoC vendors to track upstream more closely, and actually release updates for newer kernel versions, instead of the usual practice of locking each chip to whatever already-old kernel they choose from the start. Or, the golden ideal: SoC vendors should upstream their changes. But fat chance of that happening any time soon.
> (there's actually been quite a bit of progress here in getting them to actually take updates from the stable kernel at all! And that's getting thrown away now...)
I found this statement kinda funny. If the original situation was that they wouldn't take updates from the stable kernels, then what were all those unpaid developers even maintaining them for? It's bad enough that it's (for most people) unrewarding work that they weren't getting paid for... but then few people were actually making use of it? Ouch. No wonder they're giving up, regardless of any progress made with the SoC vendors.
I honestly do not understand why SoC vendors don't put the extra 1% effort in upstreaming their stuff. I've seen (and worked with) software that is lagging 3 to 4 years behind upstream developed by these vendors and if you diff it against upstream it's like 10 small commits, granted, these commits are generally hot garbage.
[0] https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/civilinfrastructureplatform...
But why do these devices need special kernels anyway? Isn't that the real problem?
Is that even feasible for projects like the Android kernel that distributes their fork to vendors when RedHat forbid redistribution of their source code?
What comprises sexy work in programming?
Backporting fixes isn't generally interesting problem solving.
Surely maintaining 40 year old bank Cobol code is important but it's not considered fun and exciting. Rewriting half of skia from C++ into Rust is arguably not important at all but it's exciting to the point that it reasonably could make the front page of HN.