How to locally maintain an end-of-life kernel branch?

[Greg KH]

On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 04:27:35PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Tue, 17 May 2016 13:09:03 -0700, Michael Harless said:
> 
> > > Eeek, why?  What is keeping you from moving to a newer kernel version?
> > > Why is sticking with 3.14 a good idea for anyone?
> > >
> >
> > It's mainly due to certifications and testing and our upgrade process.  My
> > wish would be to update to a new kernel as well.
> 
> That's a very broken certification system, if it allows you to attach
> pretty much random patches onto a "blessed" 3.14 kernel, but won't let
> you upgrade to a newer kernel

You beat me to it :)

> Thought Experiment:  What happens if you take a standard 3.14 kernel, and apply
> *every single* patch from 3.15 from Linus's tree except the one that actually
> tags it as 3.15?

Hey, wait, some other distro did that once, and guess what, no one
noticed!  So other distros finally got wise and just gave up the charade
and now do full kernel updates on incremental releases, with no reported
problems at all (i.e. SuSE and Oracle.)

So, just grab the 4.4 kernel tree and patch the makefile to say it is
3.14 and you should pass the certification system just fine!

best of luck,

greg k-h