ome years ago, prominent community leaders doubted that even short-term stable maintenance of kernel releases was feasible. More recently, selecting an occasional kernel for a two-year maintenance cycle has become routine, and some kernels, such as 3.2 under the care of Ben Hutchings, have received constant maintenance for as much as six years. But even that sort of extended maintenance is not enough for some use cases, as Yoshitake Kobayashi explained in his Embedded Linux Conference talk. To meet those needs, the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project is setting out to maintain releases for a minimum of 20 years.
Read more at LWN.net.