RHEL Backporting

Setting up a new backport target

When we want to backport security fixes or critical bugs to an older RHEL release we maintain, we setup a backport branch.

• Create a new branch based on latest tag which was packaged into the RHEL release
• Setup a bots testmap for CI to run on the backport branch, see this commit for RHEL 9.8/10.2
• Drop .github workflows and Packit builds/tests which are not needed see 53714076f19f5052cefaf247b1cb0df8c23fb494 and e9d2aa23fe7314eb4789ea4ef0038f7984d312bc

Backporting procedure

We maintain backport branches for issues which should be fixed in older RHEL releases. Backports should only be done via an JIRA issue (critical bug or CVE).

The backport procedure is as following:

• Create a new branch based on the backport branch for example rhel-8 for RHEL 8.10 or rhel-9.8 for RHEL 9.8. As we release the same Cockpit version for RHEL 9 and 10 we only maintain one rhel-9.8 which is also used for rhel-10-2 as both have Cockpit 356.
• Cherry pick to be backported commits from main, the commit should mention from which commit it was backported
• Create a pull request against the backport branch.
• Get a review & merge the pull request
• Fetch the latest backport branch and create a new minor release

For example for RHEL 9.8

git worktree add -b rhel-9-8-cve-2026-4802 rhel-9-8-cve-2026-4802 upstream/rhel-9.8
cd rhel-9-8-cve-2026-4802
git cherry-pick --edit $commit