Delaying Patches to the Stable Tree

Greg Kroah-Hartman recently decided to make a small change to the way the stable kernels accepted patches. Typically, any patch intended for the stable series had to get into Linus Torvalds's tree first, thus guaranteeing that it wouldn't just become an aging artifact of the stable series but would persist in the official tree as well. This policy has drawn its share of complaints, because certain relatively obvious fixes had to be delayed by Linus's -rc release cycle.

Greg recently applied a patch to the stable series to fix a race condition in the genetlink code. However, although the patch had gone to Linus's tree first, it hadn't been tested long enough and turned out to have a significant bug. The problem wasn't caught until Greg had released the official 3.0.92 kernel.

Linus suggested, "I really think there should be delay before stable picks up stuff from mainline, unless it's something particularly critical and well-discussed. Maybe a week or so." He added that the buggy code was already in the 3.0 and 3.10 kernels, so it would actually have to be reverted in multiple places.

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