Frozen "stable" kernels may be less secure

[Goverp]

A fascinating article referenced on slashdot says that distros "curating" backported security patches to some fixed stable kernel are less secure than just following the upstream latest stable kernel.

IIUC this doesn't apply to Gentoo, as our gentoo-foo kernels all track the latest stable pretty closely.
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Greybeard

[Hu]

The underlying CIQ piece was also referenced on lwn.net. Comments there suggest that, at least in part, the analysis was flawed because it considers RHEL to have a security defect if the patch to fix that defect is not in the RHEL source, regardless of whether the patch is in a source file that RHEL does not even build. In particular, RHEL declines to ship some filesystems, and yet is penalized for not patching the filesystems that it does not ship.