[arch-dev-public] glibc and minimum kernel version
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
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. -- Ionuț
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
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Ionuț Bîru <ibiru@archlinux.org> 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.
I feel odd being on the other time of the argument this time- last time I advocated we stick with 2.6.18 because Xen still used that as their defacto guest kernel. But these days are past, and if there are really still providers that can't do better, they are not serving their customers well at all. Especially given Allan's later comment stating that Fedora is moving to 2.6.32 compat, I don't see any reason for us to not move to 2.6.27 as the minimum version supported. -Dan P.S. Pierre, you must be on some super-secret release list, I never saw the announcement for 3.6.18. :)
Am 11.12.2010 16:49, schrieb Allan McRae:
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.
I would have said 2.6.32. But then, I don't do any weird things, just use recent kernels.
On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 01:49:45 +1000, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> 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
Thanks for bringing this up. This also includes the question for how long we should support updates in general. (I'll open a new thread instead of hijacking this one) For the minimum kernel requiring the oldest lts one seems sane to me. This should ensure a smooth update even if you use our lts kernel and don't update that often. 3.6.18 was released for years ago, so I don't think a lot of Arch users would be affected. Greetings, Pierre -- Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre
Le 11 décembre 2010 11:44:38, Pierre Schmitz a écrit :
On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 01:49:45 +1000, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org>
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
Thanks for bringing this up. This also includes the question for how long we should support updates in general. (I'll open a new thread instead of hijacking this one)
For the minimum kernel requiring the oldest lts one seems sane to me. This should ensure a smooth update even if you use our lts kernel and don't update that often.
3.6.18 was released for years ago, so I don't think a lot of Arch users would be affected.
Greetings,
Pierre
Hi, I like the idea of Pierre to base the minimum version on the lts kernel. The reason is that it is the oldest version for which we are actively providing bugs/security fixes. We could even be audacious and adopt a convention that, at any time, the minimum version of the kernel corresponds to the current lts package. When we will upgrade the lts kernel, we will automatically update the minimum version. I think that udev >= 145-1 requires a minimum kernel version of 2.6.24.5[1], so building glibc for anything older may not make sense. Stéphane [1] http://www.archlinux.org/news/udev-minimum-kernel-version
participants (6)
-
Allan McRae
-
Dan McGee
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Ionuț Bîru
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Pierre Schmitz
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Stéphane Gaudreault
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Thomas Bächler