Hi sndwvs,

I have a general question about the stable branch and building kernels. I see that the 15.0 package repository is available. That is great, I have already switched to it on all of my slarm64 machines, even though it is still identical to the -current branch.

Going forward, will there eventually be an option in the build script to build stable/15.0 images? At this point, it does not matter, because the images as of now work both as -current and 15.0 images, it all depends on what is selected in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors. Eventually, I imagine the difference will matter at build time though.

My main question is, if there is an option to build stable images, will the kernels be of the 5.15.y series to match upstream, or will it be more board-specific the way it is now? I really don't have a strong opinion either way, I was just curious what you were planning to do there.

If anything, I would suggest that the Allwinner boards have a legacy kernel of 5.15.y (runs better than 5.4.y here, just FYI), and then the next kernel could be whatever is hot off the press. I am more indifferent regarding my other boards (i.e. Rockchip CPUs), I was just wondering what the plans were for the kernels on the Allwinner stable images.

Thanks for all you do, as always.

Hi shelldweller,

For build 15.0 you need to specify regarding the kernel, we will continue with the division into 3 parts, these are Longterm, next, legacy (from the manufacturer) they can be used both for 15.0 and for current.

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Perfect, thank you. I had not seen the DISTR_VERSION flag yet, it must have slipped by me somehow. The three-way kernel split makes a lot of sense and is exactly what I was thinking about. Very cool!

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Quick question: Are there any plans to keep the stable 15.0 branch patched? There have been a handful of security patches upstream, and I was just curious if they are going to be applied to the 15.0 branch of slarm64 eventually.

Side note: I finally found decent work again. I will be ramping up the Patreon donations again soon.

Hope you are doing well....

Hi shelldweller,

Thanks, so far so good.

Relatively, the stable branch lacks resources, everything works to maintain the current two aarch64 / riscv64 architectures.
While compiling heavy packages qt, qt-webkit, rust.

I'm glad you got it all right.

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I have been thinking about this a lot. I personally would like to see the upstream security patches make it into the 15.0 / stable branch. How much and what kind of support is needed to make this a reality? Generally speaking, the patches are few and far between compared to -current. I always appreciated longterm upstream stable support. I just patched my 32-bit 14.1 installation with the libarchive patch, for example. And I still get ca-certificate patches on that machine too. Without such patches, the stable branch is really nothing more than an unsupported snapshot.

So, what would it take to change that? Do you need a dedicated machine for this? Would more money help? How much? Or is it more a matter of time / energy / interest / sanity? I am still a bit tight on funds (the new job is not taking off like I had hoped, but I have several projects in the works, it is only a matter of time), but if you give me a target figure (or a list of needed hardware, or whatever you think would help best), I can work to make it a priority on my end. Just let me know what you think would be the best support for this purpose.

I appreciate all your hard work. Thank you.

Hi shelldweller,

Support for 15.0 requires a dedicated board and space on a sdcard or ssd. Board and place can be found. When using hardware for such purposes, constant compilation makes it more difficult to test booting such a board with new kernel/bootloader releases. And since I always use current, the stable branch is less relevant to me.

Oh, I see. Gotcha.

One of these days I will purchase a large-volume sdcard and catch up to the current 15.0.

Understood. Thanks for that. I am about half way there myself:

https://slarmboards.3space.xyz/packa...-slarm64-15.0/

I have my Quartz64 chugging through the qt5 rebuild now, and then next is all the mozilla stuff.

I ran into a little snag rebuilding php, but I probably just need a patch for ARM or something. Will try that one again after the mozilla rebuilds are done.

None of this is official in any sense. I just wanted to see if I could do it with the resources I had here.

Thanks for everything you do, as always.

only heavy packages left

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Thank you for the 15.0 patches, I appreciate those. The mozilla- packages are certainly quite a chore to build. It took me three tries to get Firefox built, and when it would fail, it would fail after about ten hours, so it took me several days to get all of those done. And then, once I had Thunderbird built, an update came out for it right about the same time, so I had to build it again shortly after. Quite a chore, so I appreciate the official patch support. Makes a huge difference.

thanks again, keep rocking.