Will RL 9.x ever get kernel 5.15?

Rocky Linux General
1

A newbie question: will Rocky Linux 9.x ever move from Linux kernel 5.14 to 5.15, or stay in 5.14 for the rest of its natural life?

The only reason I am asking is because apparently 5.15 has kernel support for NTFS, so just wondering if I waited for that, or just go ahead and install the ntfs-3g driver from the epel repo? I want to be able to use my NTFS formatted USB drives and memory sticks also on Linux…

I presume RL/RHEL 9.x stays in 5.14.x, considering RL/RHEL 8.x apparently also has stayed in kernel 4.18 from the beginning.

2

The kernels generally stay the same for the entire lifetime of a major release. 5.15 will not come. You may need to stick with the ntfs-3g and ntfsprogs packages from epel.

3

You may wish to enable elrepo-kernel, as this has two kernels - kernel-lt and kernel-ml the first being kernel 6.1.26 and the second being 6.3.0. Assuming that NTFS is enabled in the kernel, then these could be an option if not wishing to use ntfs-3g in kernel 5.14.

4

Ok so there is an option to also use newer kernels.

However since I don’t know what possible drawbacks there is with doing that, I guess I’ll just use ntfs-3g since it has woekd ok for my purposes in the past on other Linux distros.

I just wanted to make sure that if I install the ntfs-3g driver now, RL9.x doesn’t move to a newer kernel next month and the ntfs-3g installation becomes redundant. I guess that is not the case.

5

Unfortunately, NTFS is not enabled in ELRepo’s kernels.

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6

Red Hat does backport some features to the RHEL kernel.

An example is nf-tables. The EL7 has kernel originally branched from upstream 3.10.
The nf-tables appeared in upstream kernel 3.13. At some point it has been backported to EL7’s “3.10”.

What and when does Red Hat choose to backport? Only they do know, but “does not break existing setups” seems to be a prime directive.

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7

I wasn’t sure what ntfsprogs is so I googled. Is it needed or redundant nowadays?

Wikipedia says:

On April 12, 2011 Tuxera announced that Ntfsprogs project was merged into NTFS-3G.

8

The files of a program can be distributed in multiple packages.

See:

dnf info ntfs-3g ntfsprogs

Note how one has “Linux NTFS userspace driver” and the other has the “NTFS filesystem libraries and utilities”, but both packages are built from same ntfs-3g-*.src.rpm.

Furthermore, see:

dnf repoquery -l ntfs-3g
dnf repoquery -l ntfs-3g

The contents are not redundant.

dnf repoquery --requires --resolve ntfs-3g
shows that the ntfs-3g does not require ntfsprogs and
dnf repoquery --requires --resolve ntfsprogs
shows that the ntfsprogs does not require ntfs-3g,
but both do require ntfs-3g-libs.

Can you live without the utilities? Probably, but they are “part of ntfs-3g”.

9

I maintain a 5.15 lt branch based on the fedora configs
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/kwizart/kernel-longterm-5.15

But in most cases, you should stick to Rocky kernel that has it’s own schedule for improvements.

(Also there is a 6.1 Long term tree).