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

On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 12:39 -0400, Daenyth Blank wrote:

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 22:45, Allan McRae wrote:

...

Now glibc-2.10 is out, I will be preparing another toolchain rebuild. One question that has been discussed previously is bumping the minimum kernel required by glibc. Bumping it too recent is full of stupid, but bumping it some would cut down on some unnecessary glibc workaround code.

I am thinking that the minimal kernel version should be 2.6.22 which was released two years ago. It is the lowest kernel version that udev works with so people using kernels older than that need to do some workarounds anyway.

Any comments/objections? Allan

I think it depends how difficult it is to work around. What's involved for a user who would be affected by this?

The user would have to recompile glibc from source. The user will need to do that from a different system though, as all the user is getting after upgrading glibc is "FATAL: Kernel too old" on every command executed. No way to revert to an older glibc, because not a single command will execute. This is why I don't like bumping this beyond 2.6.18.