Organization Linux The Foundation announced that it would be providing long-term support for the core branch. Linux 6.1. Support will be provided under the SLTS (Super Long Term Support) program, which, unlike LTS (Long Term Support) releases, implies a longer support cycle focused on the use of the kernel in civil infrastructure technical systems and in critical industrial systems. Updates for the branch Linux 6.1 will be released for at least 10 years, during which time not only fixes affecting reliability and security will be backported into the kernel, but also improvements from newer branches will be backported to support new hardware. A similar extended maintenance cycle was previously applied to kernels 4.4, 4.19, and 5.10.
To track updates to the SLTS 6.1 branch, a git repository called linux-cip has been proposed. The SLTS branch will be maintained by someone working under the auspices of Linux The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Foundation project is being developed with the participation of companies such as Toshiba, Siemens, Renesas, Bosch, Hitachi, and MOXA. In addition to representatives from the aforementioned companies, SLTS kernel maintenance will include maintainers of the LTS branches of the main kernel, developers Debian and the creators of the KernelCI project.
List of LTS branches maintained by kernel developers Linux:
- 6.1 - until December 2026 + support within SLTS (used in Debian 12).
- 5.15 - until October 2026 (used in Ubuntu 04/22, Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 7 and OpenWRT master).
- 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 in Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6)
- 4.19 - until December 2024 + support within SLTS (used in Debian 10 and in Android 10).
- 4.14 - until January 2024
Source: opennet.ru
