Re: Lots of kernels

On 5/28/26 2:50 AM, Michael wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 May 2026 19:01:22 British Summer Time Dale wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> :-)  :-)
> I don't know if the patches for recent vulnerabilities have all been
> backported to 6.18.x, which has seen almost a daily roll of updates, but
> the 6.19.x you are running seems to have been dropped off the tree,
> perhaps in favour of the 7.0.x series:
>
> https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources


That happens quite often.  I pick a kernel to upgrade to and the next 
time I sync, it is gone.  I just keep the source around until I roll 
through newer kernels and it gets cleaned out of /boot, then I unmerge it.

I'm just curious as to when all the fixes get taken care of.

Dale

:-)  :-)