On Wed, 19 Jun 2019 20:47:34 +0530, Pintu Agarwal said:
No I mean to say, there are lots of features and customization already done on this version and stabilized. Upgrading again may require months of effort.
This is what happens when you don't upstream your local changes. And no, saying "But we're a small company and nobody cares" isn't an excuse - Linux carried the entire Voyager architecture around for several years for 2 machines. Not two models, 2 physical machines, the last 2 operational systems of the product line. (Not the Xubuntu-based Voyage distribution either - the Voyager was a mid-80s SMP fault-tolerant system from NCR with up to 32 486/586 cores and 4G of memory, which was a honking big system for the day...) https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rzhang/linux/+/v2.6... The architecture was finally dropped in 2009 when enough hardware failures had happened that James Bottomley was unable to create a bootable system from the parts from both... So if your production run is several thousand systems, that's *plenty* big enough for patches and drivers (especially since drivers for hardware you included in your several-thousand system run are also likely applicable to a half dozen other vendors who made several thousand systems using the same chipset....