The OpenELA (Open Enterprise Linux Association), formed last year by CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle and SUSE to join efforts to ensure compatibility with RHEL, introduced the kernel-lts project, within which it will provide additional support for some outdated LTS branches kernels after they are no longer officially supported.
The first kernel to receive additional support will be the 4.14 branch, which was published in November 2017 and has been supported for 6 years. In January, the core kernel development team stopped maintaining this branch. OpenELA has resumed maintenance and updates for kernel 4.14 will be released at least until December 2024. Following the final release of Linux kernel 4.14.336, the OpenELA team has already released extended updates 4.14.337-openela, 4.14.338-openela and 4.14.339-openela.
Maintenance provided by OpenELA will follow the same rules and processes that apply to regular stable LTS kernels. No additional restrictions, such as binding to specific equipment or products, will be introduced. Updates will be released based on the work of tracking fixes from the current kernel branches and migrating them to the maintained extended LTS branches.
In addition to extensive support for LTS kernel branches, the OpenELA association maintains a repository with packages that can be used as a basis for creating distributions that are fully binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, identical in behavior (at the error level) to RHEL, and suitable for use as RHEL replacements. The repository is maintained jointly by the development teams of RHEL-compatible Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, and SUSE Liberty Linux distributions, and includes the packages necessary to build distributions compatible with the RHEL 8 and 9 branches (RHEL 7 is planned). The OpenELA repository took the place of the git.centos.org repository, which was discontinued by Red Hat.
Kernel developers continue to maintain the following longterm branches of the Linux kernel:
- 6.6 - until December 2026 (used in Ubuntu 24.04).
- 6.1 - until December 2026 + support within SLTS (used in Debian 12 and the main branch of OpenWRT).
- 5.15 - until October 2026 (used on Ubuntu 22.04, Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 7 and OpenWRT 23.05).
- 5.10 - until December 2026 + support within SLTS (used in Debian 11, Android 12 and OpenWRT 22).
- 5.4 - until December 2025 (used in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6)
- 4.19 - until December 2024 + support within SLTS (used in Debian 10 and Android 10).
Separately, based on kernels 4.4, 4.19, 5.10 and 6.1, the Linux Foundation provides SLTS (Super Long Term Support) branches, which are maintained separately and supported for 10-20 years. SLTS branches are maintained within the framework of the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project, which involves companies such as Toshiba, Siemens, Renesas, Bosch, Hitachi and MOXA, as well as the maintainers of the LTS branches of the main kernel, Debian developers and the creators of the KernelCI project. . SLTS cores are aimed at application in technical systems of civil infrastructure and in critical industrial systems.
Source: opennet.ru