Re: Question about the maintenance of OOT RT patches for LTS releases (v12.x and v18.x)

Hey Luis!

On August 20, 2026 thus sayeth Luis Claudio R. Goncalves:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 04:23:14PM +0200, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> > On 2026-08-19 11:30:11 [-0500], Bryan Brattlof wrote:
> > > > I did assume we have v6.18 in maintenance but somehow it skipped. *I*
> > > > usually skip updates if there are no clashes and nothing changes.
> > > 
> > > Did we decide to skip v6.18 ? There are a few people internally asking 
> > > me for a roadmap again with some guidance on the lifetime of the branch.
> > 
> > As of v6.18.45 the v6.18.37-rt6 applies as-is. Winthin the git tree, the
> > stable tree tag can be merged. Does this work?
> 
> There seems to be a conflict when applying the 8250 nbcon patches. IIRC you
> fixed that conflict (or something quite close to that) on v7.1-rc.
> 
> The conflict:
> 
> $ git checkout -b test01 v6.18.37-rt6
> $ git rebase -v v6.18.45
>   Changes from 0c503cf3dde2e53614f05261ece12f9d3d4c3c20 to bf3be28f6721e24961992ebb9e61c0cf21a56806:
>   ...
>   Rebasing (1/29)
>   dropping bea58d7ab5ba4367a3208ecd1854a74b66b21f51 net: gro_cells: fix lock imbalance in gro_cells_receive() -- patch contents already upstream
>   Rebasing (2/29)
>   Auto-merging drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c
>   CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in drivers/tty/serial/8250/8250_port.c
>   Auto-merging include/linux/serial_8250.h
>   error: could not apply 0b053910fa95... Reapply "serial: 8250: Switch to nbcon console"
> 
> Bryan, is this the problem you are seeing?
> 

Yep that exactly what I saw as well. Though it looks like our teams are 
able to merge v6.18.37-rt6 into their tree[0]. My guess is because 
they're also merging Greg's stable syncs everything worked out? ¯\(ツ)/¯

Thank you again Luis and Sebastian

~Bryan

[0] https://git.ti.com/cgit/ti-linux-kernel/ti-linux-kernel/log/?h=ti-rt-linux-6.18.y-arm32-cicd