[Milhouse]

Quick question, what's the reason for the stop in using new kernels?

After the Spectre/Meltdown problems LibreELEC took the decision to focus on releasing "Long Term Support" (LTS) kernels only, which means that LE9 will be based on 4.14.y (the current LTS kernel) regardless of whatever stable or mainline kernel may be available at the time. LE10 will bump to the next LTS kernel, which is likely to be 4.19.y, or possibly 4.20.y.

Bringing up new major kernels (4.15.y, 4.16.y, 4.17.y etc.) is often a lot of work as so many out of tree drivers usually end up broken by the new kernel and require patching (for example, Realtek Wifi drivers, plus Nvidia drivers etc.).

Since these non-LTS kernels are never going to be released by LibreELEC, then from my point of view there's no longer any point doing all the monkey work to bring up a kernel that is basically being tested only for the sake of testing and will never be released.

Sticking with LTS-only kernels simplifies maintenance and lowers the risk of problems in a new release, but totally screws support for new hardware (eg. AMD GPUs, Intel CPUs etc.) which is unfortunate, with upstream projects losing out as well. It's a decision that has definite pros and cons.

Maybe this decision will change in future but for now it's out of my hands. I can see both sides so I'm not pushing one way or the other, but I have to say the current situation does make my life much easier and going back to the old way isn't something I'd now do readily.