Kernel 5.3.18 in opensuse 15.3 is outdated?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi.

I have Opensuse 15.3 with all the patches applied … or that is what I thought. I am having a issue with a disk formatted with btrfs so I am seeking help in btrfs development list. In one of the answers some guy tell me to do something "if I was using kernel 5.11 or newer, so I test it

**andromeda:~ #** uname -r 
5.3.18-150300.59.76-default

5.3? and that guy says 5.11? what is the latest kernel? so I go to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history

And I find the latest is 5.18 and it says 5.3 reached EOL in december 2019 with 5.3.18

So I have something wrong in my system?

2

Isn’t that typical for Leap? All products are frozen when a Leap version is released. Security patches (and recommended) are supplied as backports. So the main version does not change and the security is there. That is also true for the kernel.

The present Leap 15.3 kernel package is versioned 5.3.18-150300,59.76.1.
I do not know what the extra numbers exactly mean, but they indicate the build. And the build includes the security patches.

3

Hi
Nothing wrong with the kernel, it has security fixes backported and is supported by openSUSE. That is the trouble with version numbers, they mean nothing in the openSUSE world… Features is a different story…

You might be better off with a openSUSE bug report…

4

I don’t understand
Opensuse Leap 15.3 was released on June 02, 2021
Opensuse Leap 15.2 was released on July 07 2020

Kernel 5.3 reached End Of Live in 2019. So we are using a kernel …

“I’m announcing the release of the 5.3.18 kernel. Note, this is the LAST 5.3.y kernel release. It is now end-of-life. Please move to 5.4.y now. All users of the 5.3 kernel series must upgrade,” said Greg Kroah-Hartman in amailing list announcement… three years ago

5

Hi
Lots of packages are old :wink: It’s ‘supported’ end of life means no more features/updates doesn’t mean in the case of openSUSE it can’t be used, security fixes, cve’s etc are dealt with as required for the lifetime of the release…

Remember the dot release (service pack) is an update of Leap 15 which was released…when?

You should be moving towards upgrading to the next release (service pack, dot 4 release)? It has the 5.14 kernel.

Again you have a few months left, create a bug report on the issue and work with them to resolve… openSUSE:Submitting bug reports - openSUSE

6

Leap’s “old” kernels, which are actually SLE kernels, don’t just get security fixes. SLE subscribers can’t wait 2-3 years for needed new hardware to be supported. So the kernels also get hardware support backports. This is why Leap’s kernel version numbers have little usefulness. New functionality does have wait for newer kernel versions. Those are available from the build service repo: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/stable:/Backport/standard/x86_64/

7

Leap 15.3 kernel 5.3 is a backported kernel 5.9, so you have features inside as in kernel 5.9. For example WLAN rtw88, which was added to kernel 5.9.

But because of SLE its name 5.3…

Security fixes are backported by openSUSE/SLE.

Leap 15.4 Kernel 5.14 is a backported Kernel 5.15.

8

Additional some more precise informations (than wikipedia) are available on kernel.org
The Linux Kernel Archives - Releases

Distribution kernels

Many Linux distributions provide their own “longterm maintenance” kernels that may or may not be based on those maintained by kernel developers. These kernel releases are not hosted at kernel.org and kernel developers can provide no support for them.
It is easy to tell if you are running a distribution kernel. Unless you downloaded, compiled and installed your own version of kernel from kernel.org, you are running a distribution kernel. To find out the version of your kernel, run uname -r:

uname -r

5.6.19-300.fc32.x86_64 If you see anything at all after the dash, you are running a distribution kernel. Please use the support channels offered by your distribution vendor to obtain kernel support.