Re: Lots of kernels

On 5/18/26 5:36 PM, David Bryant wrote:
> On 5/18/26 2:35 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> Hello, Gentoo.
>>
>> Has anybody else noticed that we're getting rather a lot of
>> gentoo-sources kernels in recent codebase updates?
>>
>> It seems we're getting around one every two days, completely unmasked.
>> For example, gentoo-sources-6.18.26 was released on 2026-05-01, 6.18.32
>> today, and no version in between was keyworded.  That's 7 versions in
>> the space of 17 days.
>>
>> This doesn't particularly bother me, but I am somewhat puzzled.
>> Recently there have been quite a few high ranking vulnerabilities
>> discovered in Linux, and I'm wondering if all these kernels contain
>> fixes for these.  But I keep a clone of the Linux "stable" sources, and
>> there is no mention of these CVEs in the clone's log files.
>>
>> Can anybody shed any light on this?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
> These are all apparently security fixes for bugs that were recently
> uncovered by Anthropic's AI tool.
>
> I inquired about it in the forum about two weeks ago
> (https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=1177629), and didn't really
> learn much except "the patches are necessary". I did subscribe to the
> kernel mailing list at https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-kernel/ -- as
> you can see, the kernel team has been very busy lately. I'm not sure how
> to make sense out of all the patches ... that's probably easier to do at
> the main Linux kernel web site.
>


I don't update my kernel very often, don't reboot much either.  Can 
someone post when the dust has settled and what version is thought to be 
a version with minimal bugs?  Because of a video problem I recently 
updated my kernel to 6.19.14 and I use gentoo-sources.  It seems they 
are trying to keep up with upstream and doing pretty well.  I'd like to 
update when the dust settles and a lot of things get fixed but see no 
need to do so until they are done cleaning up things.  From the way it 
sounds, they kinda going at it pretty hard so it may be that the dust 
has already settled or will pretty soon.

Could someone who tracks this stuff let the rest of us who don't track 
each change know when the clean up is done?  I'd also like to update the 
kernel on my backup rig, NAS box and such as well. There's just no big 
hurry to do it until things settle down a bit.

Most grateful if someone could let the rest of us know.  :-D

Dale

:-)  :-)