On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
On 01/21/2016 09:29 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
This is a community SIG .. and xenproject.org does NOT release XSAs for 4.2. The goal of Xen4centOS was to use an upstream LTS kernel and update those as required to stay on an LTS. Also to do every second point release of xen (ie, 4.2, 4.4, 4.6). All so we are longer term than upstream, BUT we have supported code from upstream.
So, the goal is to use supported code for the longest amount of time the upsreams support them. For xenproject.org .. they support the two newest releases. For kernel.org, they do a new kernel LTS about every 2 years.
We don't have 5000 engineers to maintain community SIGs like they maintain the distro. We have to have supported code from upstream projects.
So what does this mean ..
xenproject.org supports 4.6 and 4.5 right now. (last 2 releases).
This isn't exactly right.
Recent releases have 18 months of "support" (meaning, bug fixes are backported), and then another 18 months of "security backports", which means only XSAs are backported [1], regardless of when or how many releases have been made. It just happens that most releases recently have ended up taking about 9 months, which means at any given time you have 2 in 'active support'; but that's mostly a coincidence. :-)
So 4.4 won't be getting any more point releases, but it should continue to get XSAs through March 2017. (This table [2] has it ending in March 2016, but I'm pretty sure that's a mistake.)
-George
[1] http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Maintenance_Releases
[2] http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Release_Features