[arch-dev-public] glibc and minimum kernel version

Allan McRae allan at archlinux.org
Sat Dec 11 19:37:19 EST 2010


On 12/12/10 02:12, Ionuț Bîru wrote:
> On 12/11/2010 05:49 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am in the progress of updating the toolchain and thought it time to
>> review what our minimum required kernel version is for glibc.
>>
>> For those that do not know, assuming a newer kernel allows glibc to have
>> less workarounds compiled in. So it may be advantagous to have a more
>> recent version as the minimum required. This comes at the obvious cost
>> of not having support for older kernels so a tradeoff is needed... When
>> we discussed this 18 months ago, it was decided 2.6.18 was appropraite
>> then, but much has changed since.
>>
>> I am going to suggest that we follow the oldest longterm support kernel.
>> That would now be the 2.6.27.x series, which has been around for over
>> two years.
>>
>> That might be being overly bold, so feel free to point out how much such
>> an update would break... and suggest an alternative minimum.
>>
>> Allan
>
> all companies that sell openvz vps use 2.6.18 kernel. I have one and i
> would prefer to minimal kernel version to be the same.

Don't you need to make a lot of other changes to run Arch on such an old 
kernel (static dev? etc)?

Also note that Fedora 14 moved from 2.6.18 to 2.6.32 (following the 
kernel version update in RHEL6) so either these people start supporting 
2.6.32 can not support those distros.

Allan


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