Linux-Stable-Security Kernel Tree Announced

Sasha Levin of Oracle has announced the formation of the Linux-Stable Security Tree.

This new tree will be based off the mainline Linux stable tree but focus on just carrying fixes for security vulnerabilities. Other changes normally found in stable Linux point releases wouldn't be integrated.

Levin explained in the release message:

Quite a few users of the stable trees pointed out that on complex deployments, where validation is non-trivial, there is little incentive to follow the stable tree after the product has been deployed to production. There is no interest in "random" kernel fixes and the only requirements are to keep up with security vulnerabilities.

Given this, a few projects preferred to delay important kernel updates, and a few even stopped updating the tree altogether, exposing them to critical vulnerabilities.

This project provides an easy way to receive only important security commits, which are usually only a few in each release, and makes it easy to incorporate them into existing projects.

The Linux-Stable-Security code is hosted via this Git repository.