Are there plans to upgrade the kernel to 6.7 and above?

For Developers
1

I recently tried bcachefs introduced in kernel 6.7 on my PC, and its tiered storage is quite useful. My router happens to have a small SSD and some large HDDs mounted on it. If OpenWrt uses kernel 6.7 or above, I can use the same technology to optimize storage performance on my router. I'm really looking forward to it. So when will the next kernel version upgrade of OpenWrt master branch happen? Is there any plan?

2

To your question, yes, I’m sure those plans are in the works. Though that’s really hard to say when. Iirc, Release 24.x originally was set for 6.1 kernel, but it was decided to move to 6.6 first. At this point it’s anyone’s guess when (or if) 24.x will branch before year end.

I don’t even know if there is even a testing kernel version at this point.

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3

You can find further details about kernel updates in general via the forum search.

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That aside, don't expect support for booting OpenWrt from bcachefs anytime soon (years+). It's not really clear what optimization you're looking for either, it's a router - it barely makes a differrence if you boot OpenWrt from a 20 year old 128 MB USB2 stick with 2-3 MByte/s read throughput - or a NVMe SSD with north of 3000 MByte/s and several 100k of IOPS.

4

There are existing hierarchical block storage options like bcache and lvmcache, those are mature technology-wise, supported from kernel 4.something.
Your PR is welcome to add kmod knobs and packages that make better one into OpenWRT.

5

https://kernel.org/
First of all, there isn’t anything newer than 6.6 to upgrade to.

But I would be surprised if we doesn’t upgrade in the future.

6

The only thing I know is that upcoming Linux LTS kernel is planned (not yet confirmed) to be 6.12 - whether OpenWrt 25.x/26.x will use this version, or skip to a next kernel LTS is unknown to me

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7

Additionally, as mentioned in various other threads, you can follow progress of the current 6.6 implementation on its github issue. Every kernel upgrade gets a github issue like this, at least for the past 3-4 upgrades, and it seems like it's tradition now.

5.15 https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/10672
6.1 https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/14546
6.6 https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/15192

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8

I have openwrt with 6.9 kernel for my mt7621 and 6.10 kernel for mt7981. You can build it yourself. Also you can look here https://github.com/Ysurac/openmptcprouter/tree/develop/6.10

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