Kernel question


Eight Bit

Hardcore Member
Joined
Nov 16, 2008
Messages
1,979
Age
49
Location
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Website
Visit site
Hi,
This might sound silly but I have a question. I noticed this tweet about a new kernel for the openpandora among other devices. What benefit does this have compared to the kernel we have? Everything already works like it should doesn't it?
 
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-413-features&num=1

I don't see any features in there that will help us on Pandora. I'll leave it to you to find all the features between 4.12 and the release we currently have (3.2.84).

Note that .84 means the kernel we have had has 84 mainline fixes since it was released, which shows you the sort of churn these kernels get (3.2 was intially released at the start of 2012 for reference).

Also, the 3.2 kernel will officially be out of support come this time next year (https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html), so it's a good thing there's a supported kernel out there we can jump to with less effort, if anything exploiting 3.2.final gets released. If anyone's still porting software to it then, it might be an idea to move to a newer kernel, but if you don't download anything new, and don't open any ports then it's unlikely anyone will be able to remotely attack it.

But feel free to try this if you want. I'd expect a few kernel modules to fall over (you'd need to copy them to /usr/lib/modules/[version], or somewhere like that; my memory is always a bit flaky about this location for some reason), and I'm not sure if there was a format change between 3.2 and 4.13. Note this isn't even a proper release; it's still rc7. Release candidates are only ever really for people to try out and see if they can break them. Actually, in terms of long-term support, 3.16 would be the kernel to jump to, if that did get released for the pandora hardware in the past.
 
Back
Top