Treble time for LTS releases

Linux Kernel 4.14, the new long term support (LTS) branch of the project led by Linus Torvalds, is set to be released this November, bringing with it a significant change in the maintenance life cycle of Linux overall.

LTS branches have recently enjoyed at least two years of maintenance after their releases. However, at Linaro Connect in San Francisco, a few weeks back, Iliyan Malchev (Google) announced that the maintenance life cycle for LTS kernels would triple to a six-year cycle starting with version 4.4. The extended time will encourage hardware vendors to adopt the latest available LTS.

While this change is particularly appealing for devices such as smartphones running Android, it’ll also be beneficial to Google’s new Project Treble, which focuses on addressing another important issue: the fragmentation of Android versions out there.

With massive out-of-tree patches, smartphone hardware vendors are using kernels that are completely unsecure. In some cases, less than 20 per cent of the kernel code running on the device comes from upstream. That’s what Project Treble aims to address.

Designed to make it easier for manufacturers to update their devices to new versions of Android, Treble creates a common Android tree for hardware vendors to work from. Ideally, vendors will start pushing patches upstream but short of that, they’ll now be able to push to that common tree, allowing for smoother updates and eventually ending fragmentation.

It’s undeniable that Google has been pushing the largest amount of devices running Linux into consumers’ hands. This new LTS life cycle will benefit everyone using Linux though, and we hope to see enterprise Linux distribution vendors and others align behind these efforts as well. Mark Filion is marketing manager at Collabora Ltd.