Release roadmap? When should we expect 18.xx release?

[Rich Brown]

Hi Jo,

Thanks for this update - all good news. A couple minor thoughts:

1) Is Spectre important for LEDE? (What is the threat model?) Given the short delivery window, a switch of compilers does seem risky. It's simpler (from a publicity/marketing/mindshare point of view) to say, "The first 18.x does not address Spectre" and focus on getting the remediation into the next release.

2) Given the target delivery date of 31 March, is there any value to waiting a day, and naming the first release "18.04.0"? I always wished that we had named our first release 17.02.0, since it didn't hit the streets until mid-February...

Thanks to all for this good work.

Rich



> On Feb 8, 2018, at 9:37 AM, Jo-Philipp Wich <jo at mein.io> wrote:
> 
> Hi Hannu,
> 
> there's been a brief discussion about that in the #lede-dev IRC channel.
> 
> There appears to be a solid consensus on doing a mixed kernel 4.9 / 4.14
> release, so that will not block the process.
> 
> A couple of undecided points currently are:
> 
> * How to properly deal with Spectre
> 
>   It appears that we'll need gcc 7 based retpoline support to ship with
>   full mitigations but jumping to gcc 7 shortly before the release is
>   too risky, so we considered doing a mixed gcc 5 / gcc 7 release with
>   7.x used for x86 and ARM and 5.x for the rest
> 
> * Timeline
> 
>   I proposed to target March 31 to have 18.03.0 ready and there was no
>   clear objection to this but so far we didn't commit on this date
> 
> * Identify blockers
> 
>   I currently have no definite overview over release critical blockers,
>   so either I or someone else needs to find time to review the current
>   bug situation per target
> 
> 
> Despite 18.x, I definitely plan one or two further 17.01.x point
> releases, Rafał also expressed interest in this.
> 
> ~ Jo
> 
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