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Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

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Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#61

Post by mackal »

honestthrowaway wrote: post #56
bcook wrote: post #54

Some browsers have different goals. Is that a problem?

It's supremely arrogant to tell your users to change the kernel they are using because you couldn't be bothered to fix a regression in your code. The problem with that approach is self-evident.

I'm not sure I would say its supremely arrogant to tell them to upgrade their kernels. I'm sure if they realized that they were breaking sub 3.16 kernels they would of announced it before hand, but they fudged that. So instead of fixing it to not use a kernel feature they wanted to use, they just said "well this sucks"

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#62

Post by igravious »

wtallis wrote: post #16
rdtsc wrote: post #4

Really, a browser is now dependent on a particular Linux kernel? For example RHEL/CentOS 7 which was released just last year with at least a 10 year support ahead of it is now obsolete according to them because it has a kernel version 3.10... Not that many people are on desktop versions of those OSes, and those that are will not use Chrome (for example, US govt loves them some Desktop RHEL systems, but Chrome is usua…

When you commit to a 10-year support cycle, you'd better be prepared to backport quite a few things. Google's being aggressive about taking advantage of a kernel-level security feature that they developed to solve a real problem. This seems like a good thing overall.

It'd be nice if they used some of their massive pile of cash to back-port that feature and generate a ton of good will.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#63

Post by vacri »

fpgeek wrote: post #40
teraflop wrote: post #17

Chrome "unofficially" dropped support for pre-3.16 kernels, such as the kernel in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, about half a year ago. More precisely, they introduced a bug that caused installing extensions to fail with that kernel, and then declined to fix it. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=401655 See comment #47: "Ok, while it sounds like this is technically a regression, I'm going to mark this as Wontfix…

First, I'll note that plenty of people use Chrome without extensions. This issue wasn't a showstopper for any of them. Second, you cut out the rest of the comment: "If that causes great hardship for anyone and you want to do the work to figure out what's going on submit patches to fix it, I can provide pointers for where to start looking and code reviews for the patch." Since that comment has anyone done anything oth…

So you only care about problems if the user is a skilled developer, and then only if they're actively solving the bug (because skilled programmers are never involved in other projects eating their time...)?

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#64

Post by frankzinger »

yuhong wrote: post #58
honestthrowaway wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming that Chrome pioneered sandboxing doesn't pass the smell test, irrespective of how many Google employees (according to your profile) are backing you up.

But do you know who comex is? People sometimes are not exactly precise and sometimes make mistakes too.

  But do you know who comex is?
I didn't, and it was not that easy to find out, but I was curious. He is Nicholas Allegra and he is known for jailbreaking the iPhone. See http://www.androidbeat.com/2013/04/google-comex/ and http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/08/01/meet-co.... He went on to work for Apple and now for Google, apparently on the Chome or Chrome OS teams.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#65

Post by pmontra »

Most people update the kernel when their distro does. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is currently at a .5 version with kernel 3.13. There seem to be no plans for a 12.04.6 with a newer kernel but we'll see.

Maybe TSYNC can be backported to 3.13 (I'm unsure about who has to do it) or Chromium can be compiled without TSYNC (distro's choice). If nothing happens this is going to cost Google some users but obviously it's their browser and their choice of how to implement it and where it can run.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#66

Post by oliwarner »

skuhn wrote: post #33
ryanprichard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least there seems to be a supported method for updating the 14.04 kernel: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseNotes#LTS_Hardware... Apparently, Ubuntu 14.04.2 installs a 3.16 kernel by default, and previous 14.04 installs can be updated by installing a bunch of "*-utopic" packages.

This seems like a colossal mess waiting to happen. I'm glad that I read their plan, so that I can completely avoid it. The allure of Ubuntu LTS releases (currently 12.04 and 14.04) is the extended support cycle -- practically speaking the kernel is the biggest component of this for a lot of people. If you use the 3.16 kernel (from Ubuntu 14.10) on 14.04, you are now on a 6 month support cycle [1]. One which doesn't e…

Overreacting much? The shortened support is limited to the packages you upgrade. It's a 9 month cycle with a new version available every in 6 months. Most importantly, these are just packages, they can be uninstalled of they don't work and you fall back to LTS versions. And this is all the same for 12.04.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#67

Post by axlprose »

tbrownaw wrote: post #2

It's much more interesting to see how useful the replies are. I assume they're because it's a dumb question, but still. This is an excellent example of an unwelcoming / hostile culture.

Indeed. The culture was part of the reason I made the switch from debian to opensuse a while ago.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#68

Post by johnsea »

jfoster wrote: post #59
adrusi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not a business and that person wasn't a customer. Debian is a community, bound partially by common technical ideas about packaging, stability and security, and partially by philosophical ideas about Free software. Their goal is not to satisfy everyone who comes to their mailing list, that would be insanity.

Sure, but most people would consider the original poster's request as quite reasonable. Instead of considering it in a balanced way and producing a polite & considered response, the response was idealistic rhetoric. For better or worse, I think that does qualify the attitude of response as "unprofessional", as stingraycharles pointed out.

Google is the unprofessional one. Threaten to not support Jessie, hey? What an arrogant self-referred world Google lives in?

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#69

Post by reidrac »

colechristensen wrote: post #32
teraflop wrote: post #17

Chrome "unofficially" dropped support for pre-3.16 kernels, such as the kernel in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, about half a year ago. More precisely, they introduced a bug that caused installing extensions to fail with that kernel, and then declined to fix it. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=401655 See comment #47: "Ok, while it sounds like this is technically a regression, I'm going to mark this as Wontfix…

7 months. Linux 3.16 is 7 months old. The attitude of the Chrome team is extremely obnoxious. Some distributions support versions 10 years and beyond and there are plenty of reasonable reasons to want to use them as such. Requiring a 7 month old kernel is absurd. I keep getting the feeling that Chrome isn't the browser for me.

Without defending Chrome team here; when a distro provides long time support (say > 1 year) I don't think is upstream responsibility to support the packages for that period of time.

If the distro is upgrading the browser package I think that may break the API/ABI stability that a long time support distribution should provide, so I can't see why this is a Chrome problem.

Also it sounds wrong that a web browser depends on the kernel version; so I'm with you that there are other browsers supporting Linux.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#70

Post by cnvogel »

So, is this a feature that will also appear in Chrome for Android? Is there even an overlap in codebase? [I honestly have no idea]

Given that a lot of handsets run ridiculously old Kernels, I assume that this feature will not be usable for the next few generations of handsets (or will have to be backported, obviously).

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