3.8.y kernel declared dead.
 

The Linux kernel maintainer (Greg Kroah-Hartman) has declared the 3.8.y series dead. From http://lwn.net/Articles/550251/ he notes :

"I'm announcing the release of the 3.8.13 kernel.

NOTE, this is the LAST 3.8.y kernel release, please move to the 3.9.y
kernel series at this time. It is end-of-life, dead, gone, buried, and
put way behind us never to be spoken of again. Seriously, move on, it's
just not worth it anymore."

Personally I'd be happy to see Slackware move to 3.9 as the one feature that I'm really looking forward to (dm-cache) is in there for the first time. Finally I'll be able to use that new SSD I bought in a safe and useful way :-)

I'd say it is more safe and useful to put the most commonly used partitions on the SSD rather than relying on some obscure and fairly new mechanism to get it right. But that's just me.

I must be a little thick but what is the 'two letter hardware company' referred to in that link?

Not sure, but my money would be on the one that shares it's initials with a well known brand of sauce.

<rant>If only Greg could use the time saved not maintaining too many versions to get udev back...</rant>

At least the sauce is good.

Is it relevant for Slackware? -current just upgraded to 3.8.11.

I have been running 3.9.1 on 64 -current the last couple of days with no problem except this bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53475 (i do have a western digital drive).

I have run 3.9, and it may be a worthwhile kernel to use.

However, I will state this. Who cares what GKH says? After what he let happen with udev, I don't trust his definition of stable anymore.

Maybe this one?

The regular HP sauce is good (better than ketchup, IMO), but what I really like is the HP curry sauce. That's great for quick and easy currywurst. But regular HP mixed with green madras curry powder is better yet for that.

And to be more on topic, we knew the end was coming for 3.8.x, but I'm still inclined to think it's better to either stick with it, or move back to a 3.4 kernel rather than open up a whole new can of worms. There was a bad shutdown bug until 3.9.1, and there are still known bugs in 3.9.1. If we move to the 3.9 series we'll be starting all over on kernel debugging. At some point we need to draw the line.

I'm perfectly fine with either well-tested choice. Should I need to upgrade the kernel to 3.9.x or 3.10+ for whatever reason, it doesn't matter, if Slackware installs 3.8 or 3.4 before.

i do agree with Linux Kernel 3.8.x for now
i'm using VMWare here and i think it's broken if we used a combination of Linux Kernel 3.9 and GCC 4.8 to rebuild the modules
it worked with Linux Kernel 3.9 and GCC 4.7 or Linux Kernel 3.8 and GCC 4.8

For the long-term I would like to see llvm/clang becoming the system compiler.

Well, during -current progressions is the more likely time to see Slackware move to 3.9.X. It would be very unlikely within a stable release (don't recall it ever happening). OTOH, I've built kernels in the past that were one or more level 2 version numbers up from the original for that version of Slackware. We'll just have to see what Pat wants to do.