Everything you ever wanted to know about Linux 2.6 -stable releases.

Rules on what kind of patches are accepted, and what ones are not, into the "-stable" tree:

• It must be obviously correct and tested.
• It can not bigger than 100 lines, with context.
• It must fix only one thing.
• It must fix a real bug that bothers people (not a, "This could be a problem..." type thing.)
• It must fix a problem that causes a build error (but not for things marked CONFIG_BROKEN), an oops, a hang, data corruption, a real security issue, or some "oh, that's not good" issue. In short, something critical.
• No "theoretical race condition" issues, unless an explanation of how the race can be exploited.
• It can not contain any "trivial" fixes in it (spelling changes, whitespace cleanups, etc.)
• It must be accepted by the relevant subsystem maintainer.
• It must follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches rules.

Procedure for submitting patches to the -stable tree:

• Send the patch, after verifying that it follows the above rules, to stable@kernel.org.
• The sender will receive an ack when the patch has been accepted into the queue, or a nak if the patch is rejected. This response might take a few days, according to the developer's schedules.
• If accepted, the patch will be added to the -stable queue, for review by other developers.
• Security patches should not be sent to this alias, but instead to the documented security@kernel.org.

Review cycle:

• When the -stable maintainers decide for a review cycle, the patches will be sent to the review committee, and the maintainer of the affected area of the patch (unless the submitter is the maintainer of the area) and CC: to the linux-kernel mailing list.
• The review committee has 48 hours in which to ack or nak the patch.
• If the patch is rejected by a member of the committee, or linux-kernel members object to the patch, bringing up issues that the maintainers and members did not realize, the patch will be dropped from the queue.
• At the end of the review cycle, the acked patches will be added to the latest -stable release, and a new -stable release will happen.
• Security patches will be accepted into the -stable tree directly from the security kernel team, and not go through the normal review cycle. Contact the kernel security team for more details on this procedure.

Review committe:

• This will be made up of a number of kernel developers who have volunteered for this task, and a few that haven't.

posted Wed, 09 Mar 2005 in [/linux]