IT Home, October 11 — According to Phoronix yesterday (October 10), the Linux Plumbers Conference took place this week in Prague, Czech Republic, where Qualcomm engineer Khem Raj questioned the suitability of Linux Long Term Support (LTS) releases in the era of generative AI, particularly given the high volume of patch submissions and bug reports.
Khem Raj argued that the benefits of rolling-release distributions in the AI era are growing, as AI programming agents accelerate the pace of patch submissions to the Linux kernel and related open-source projects, placing significant burdens on open-source maintainers and distribution vendors alike.
IT Home learned from PPT that Raj believes the benefits of rolling updates include reducing the need to backport all patches, maintaining smaller divergences from upstream, and enabling faster security fixes, among other advantages.
However, he also noted that the rolling update model presents challenges in areas such as certification and eligibility review.
Raj stated that the practicality of LTS versions needs to be reevaluated to determine whether a rolling update model might be more effective for distributions, particularly embedded Linux distributions and community-maintained versions with smaller communities. Raj also mentioned that generative AI tools could be explored to assist in maintaining LTS releases.