Build NVDIMM Userspace packages for Xenial

[Jeff Lane ]

Original bug for this work in Bionic is here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1752378

Because the support for NVDIMMs laned in Bionic in 4.15, this support should also be present in Xenial via the HWE kernel.

However the NVDIMM Userspace packages for ndctl and pmdk are only built for Bionic and beyond. Would it be possible (very low priority) to also get this support into Xenial?

Feel free to mark this as WONT FIX, it's not a high prio at all, just something I noticed that would be nice to have for consistency since the hardware was technically enabled in Xenial.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

Thanks for filing this bug.

It was a lot of effort to bring this support back to bionic in #1752378. I'll mark this bug as wishlist, but ideally people should focus on bionic and later for nvdimm support.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

There is nothing for the upstream "ndctl" project to do about this.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Practically speaking, packages in "universe" tend to be supported to some degree for a maximum of 3 years from the original release of an Ubuntu LTS. That 3 years is because generally Ubuntu flavors do not offer support past that point. Once a new LTS is released 2 years later, there just isn't as much interest from volunteers to try to backport bugfixes and especially new features to the older LTS.

Since the 3 year window ended in April 2019, I'm going to go ahead and close this bug to reflect this reality. This doesn't prevent someone from working on this request until support for 16.04 LTS closes in April 2021. It's just unlikely that someone will do it.