ADI Linux version support
Mainline Linux versions
There are three types of Linux kernel releases:
Major releases (e.g. 6.0, 6.1, 6.2)
Long-term support (LTS) releases (e.g. 6.1, 6.6, 6.12)
Stable releases (e.g. 6.12.0, 6.12.1, …, 6.12.66)
Additionally, the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) continues to maintain LTS releases once mainline support ends. [1] This is done to meet industrial grade requirements.
The latest releases are listed on kernel.org. The Linux kernel version history article on Wikipedia provides helpful diagrams for understanding the various Linux kernel releases. For example, the following diagram shows all 6.x.y releases:
ADI support
All ADI changes are intended to be eventually applied upstream in the mainline Linux kernel. That process can take some time. Therefore the changes are maintained in the ADI tree on Github.
ADI follows a similar approach to that taken by mainline. It attempts to maintain ADI changes on top of the latest LTS release and update those changes with every new LTS release. That process makes it easier to upstream those changes into the mainline kernel.
ADI can also apply those changes to older LTS releases by backporting changes, but that is not done automatically given the burden of supporting multiple LTS versions.
CVE
ADI addresses upstream CVEs by applying our changes onto newer stable releases, which include fixes. Only CVEs targeting ADI changes will be applied in the ADI tree.
Mainline
On February 13, 2024 kernel.org was added as a CVE Numbering Authority, giving the Linux development community more control over how CVEs are issued. [2] Greg K-H provided context to that announcement in his blog post, Linux is a CNA, and it was covered by LWN in A turning point for CVE numbers.
Nobody who relies on backporting fixes to a non-mainline kernel will be able to keep up with this CVE stream. Any company that is using CVE numbers to select kernel patches is going to have to rethink its processes.
… distributors will simply fall back on shipping the stable kernel updates which, almost by definition, will contain fixes for every known CVE number.
CVEs for the Linux kernel are announced on the linux-cve-announce mailing list and stored in the security/vulns git repository, along with a set of scripts to parse the data.