What is the primary reason for Ubuntu-based kernels?

[esi_y]

It seems that PVE started to use Ubuntu based kernels since Xenial. It is not hidden, but it is not explained as a choice either (at least where I searched).

1. What are the reasons (in order of importance) for this? Hardware support? Feature-set? Security? Something else?

2. What will I break once I start shuffling around different kernels?

 

[fiona]

Hi,

It seems that PVE started to use Ubuntu based kernels since Xenial. It is not hidden, but it is not explained as a choice either (at least where I searched).

1. What are the reasons (in order of importance) for this? Hardware support? Feature-set? Security? Something else?

I was not involved in the decision, but AFAIK one of the main reasons was hardware support: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

2. What will I break once I start shuffling around different kernels?

It's not going to be officially supported if you use your own kernels. And note that most kernels do not come with ZFS baked-in.

 

[fabian]

besides hardware support and having a fairly "recent" kernel version, the other big point back then was that with the switch from OpenVZ to LXC as container stack, we needed good apparmor and namespace support. not all desired apparmor and namespace features were upstream/mainline at that point, apparmor and LXC being mostly developed by Ubuntu (at least back then) meant that the Ubuntu kernels had all of those already without the need of maintaining huge patch stacks. nowadays that delta is basically not existing anymore thankfully.

before that we also didn't use the stock Debian or mainline kernels, but the OpenVZ-patched kernel that had RedHat as base..

 

[esi_y]

besides hardware support and having a fairly "recent" kernel version, the other big point back then was that with the switch from OpenVZ to LXC as container stack, we needed good apparmor and namespace support. not all desired apparmor and namespace features were upstream/mainline at that point, apparmor and LXC being mostly developed by Ubuntu (at least back then) meant that the Ubuntu kernels had all of those already without the need of maintaining huge patch stacks. nowadays that delta is basically not existing anymore thankfully.

before that we also didn't use the stock Debian or mainline kernels, but the OpenVZ-patched kernel that had RedHat as base..

they only got it for LXD but yeah ok that makes sense too! I thought the RH ones were because of other bits from RH too, the rgmanager