As some interesting food for thought and weekend forum discussions, this week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague, Qualcomm engineer Khem Raj questioned the relevance of Linux Long Term Support (LTS) distributions in the era of generative AI with the constantly heavy patch flow and bug reports. Khem Raj argued the benefits of rolling release distributions in the GenAI era and the benefits it provides staying up-to-date with mainline.

With AI coding agents continue to increase the rate of patch flow to the Linux kernel and surrounding open-source projects, it continues to apply not only a large burden on the open-source maintainers but also the distribution vendors needing to deal with back-porting patches to their given kernel trees and the like. All of this patch burden is creating bottlenecks from CI/CD to release management.

Raj argued the benefits of rolling release distributions with less of a need for back-porting all these patches, maintaining the smaller divergence to upstream, faster security fixes, and more. Granted, the rolling release model presents challenges around certification and qualification and other challenges.

The presentation does present some valid points about the increased burden downstream for Linux distribution vendors maintaining LTS releases with the increased patch back-porting burden and testing. It will be interesting to see how LTS distributions evolve over time and if rolling releases become more palatable to large enterprise organizations.

Those wanting to go through all of the material can do so via the LPC presentation page.