I thought the 5.11 kernel was going to be LTS for 2 years?

And here I thought it was 5.10 that was LTS, but now I see it's merely "stable".

No plan at the moment besides giving the people their tartar sauce.

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It's listed as a 2 year LTS kernel on the releases page.

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There has been an ongoing discussion about the longevity of the 5.10 LTS kernel.
You can pick it up here,
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/k...2.2/01050.html
and find various replies here,
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/k...2.2/index.html

Search for, 5.10 LTS Kernel: 2 or 6 years?

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This was a smart move in my opinion. Hardware and software is changing rapidly so we need to be able to install on at least the latest hardware. Thanks very much.

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Considering even things way past this topic, we're yet to see which side each of those 5.1x kernel falls:

Even 5.4 series might prove to be the right one, provided back porting of new technology happens (historically they said "no" but did it anyway before too).

As the 5.10/5.11 closing windows already missed some new technology (something USB and wireless IIRC ) things that got scheduled for a later release anyway, it seems we're in ever more dire situation the more we move forward anyway?

5.10 -> 5.11 who cares?

It's all speculation, of course, but it makes me wonder whether this is a sign the 15 Beta is closer to release than I thought, or, much further away*—*I can't imagine Pat launches at release without an LTS kernel. Unless... the dev team is feeling they have their groove back and will be ready for a point release within the 2 year window?

Does not work with 390.141

Thanks for the 5.11 kernel.
The 5.10 kernel was problematic, sluggish and, IMHO, a poor choice for a LTS kernel.
The 5.11 kernel is noticeably faster and, so far, not a single problem. I won't be booting back to the 5.10 kernel, except to use VirtualBox and, hopefully, Oracle will release a new version of VB soon.
Thanks, again.

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I really hope that this doesn't happen. Releasing a stable release with an LTS that's already over a year old would just be a mistake. Yes, 5.10 is starting off rough, but so did the 4.14 kernel, and that got worked out.

The people running into issues with 5.10 are probably grateful for this.

I don't imagine Pat would release a stable with a non-LTS kernel, but maybe he'll start including the latest non-LTS stable as a kernel in testing/ for those that want newer. It would certainly be nice to have an upgraded config for the newer kernels that we don't need to dig through ourselves (I've done it plenty of times over the years, but I always prefer using Pat's as a starting point with his many more years of experience configuring kernels).

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Excuse my ignorance, but as someone who NEVER used a stable version of Slackware (as I confess that I use Slackware as its -current since around 3 years) , permit me to ask something knowing that the LTS kernels are a relatively new invention while Slackware is over 20 years old:

How many releases did Slackware with standard kernels and how many releases did with LTS kernels?

I ask this because I suspect that the majority of Slackware releases was with standard kernels, so in my ignorance I see nothing wrong with Slackware to ship again a standard kernel, how it did so many times already.

Ok, I guess you wanted to go there. Pretty easy to search, but I guess I'll do the legwork for you. Long story short, ever since the kernel formalized their LTS program, Slackware has shipped with an LTS kernel.

Now for more details (and links to back it all up)...

Official LTS releases in the kernel didn't start until 2011. They did have a form of LTS before that, but nothing was actually formalized before that and, as far as I know, there were no official announcements of long term support before 2011 (just, "hey, I'll keep this going for a while").

The first kernel that received this official long term support was the 3.0 kernel released in July 2011 (however, it didn't seem to be promoted to LTS until Jan 2012) and is now considered the 7th LTS kernel (after they went back and designated previous 2.6.x kernel that received extended support as LTS). The next release of Slackware, 14.0, released in Sep 2012, contained the 3.2.x kernel which was the 8th LTS kernel. 14.1 and 14.2 releases were both LTS kernels as well.

So, since LTS kernels have been officially available, Pat has shipped Slackware with them. During development of these stable versions, Pat has stuck with LTS kernels as the primary kernels since the 3.10 kernel was introduced in 14.1 back in 2013. So, we've had over 7 years of -current *only* using LTS kernels (and this is the first instance of -current shipping a testing/ kernel that is not LTS, however, with 14.0, he did include kernel configs for 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 kernels in testing/).

But considering how long Pat has been supporting older versions of Slackware (he's still supporting 14.0 released in 2012), I believe it'd be unlikely that he'd ship a stable release using a non-LTS kernel to maximize chances of being able to update a kernel when a severe security issue comes out without needing to switch to a new major version (especially with how many issues came out this last development cycle from Spectre/Meltdown).

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The 5.11 kernel is noticeably faster. I did not install the package, I rebuilt it with the supplied config and saying yes to ext4 filesystem. I only did it to nullify the initrd. I thought at first that the lack of an initrd made it faster. Not sure, but it sure saved 41 seconds from a cold boot.

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